esxi

What This Skill Does

The ESXi skill enables the OpenClaw agent to act as a remote administrator for VMware ESXi hypervisors. By leveraging SSH as a transport mechanism, the skill executes native commands like vim-cmd and esxcli directly on the target host. This allows for comprehensive management of the virtualization lifecycle, including powering VMs on or off, creating and reverting snapshots, monitoring system health, and inspecting hardware, storage, and network configurations. It effectively turns your terminal into a powerful, automated interface for data center infrastructure management.

Installation

To install this skill, use the ClawHub CLI: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/dlewis7444/esxi. Ensure that the target ESXi host is reachable via SSH and that the configured user has sufficient privileges to execute vim-cmd operations. It is highly recommended to set up passwordless SSH key authentication for the host to allow for seamless agent execution without interactive prompts.

Use Cases

• Automated VM Lifecycle: Spin up environments for testing or development using the provided vm-create.sh script.
• Disaster Recovery/Backups: Automate snapshot management before applying updates to production virtual machines.
• System Health Monitoring: Automatically retrieve resource usage (CPU/Memory) and storage health from production hosts.
• Troubleshooting: Rapidly diagnose networking or service issues by querying ESXi logs and configuration states through the CLI.

Example Prompts

1. "OpenClaw, list all virtual machines on the production-esxi-host and tell me which ones are currently powered off."
2. "Create a snapshot named 'pre-update' for the VM with ID 102 on my development ESXi host."
3. "Check the current hardware health and memory usage of the host named 'esxi-data-01' and report back any errors."

Tips & Limitations

• Security: Because this skill executes commands with root privileges, ensure the OpenClaw host is strictly secured and the SSH keys are protected.
• Performance: While vim-cmd is powerful, avoid spamming commands in rapid succession as it can induce load on the ESXi management agents (hostd).
• Snapshots: Do not keep snapshots for long periods; they can degrade disk performance and consume excessive storage on your datastore.
• Environment: Always verify the ESXI_USER variable if you are not using the default root account.