VMware VIX Problems

VMware VIX is one of VMware’s many virtualization APIs, which allows you to control and automate activity inside and outside of virtual machines (VMs).  Unlike VMware’s VI API (which is now called vSphere SDK for Web Services or the perl-specific wrapper, called vSphere SDK for Perl), VIX’s checkered past lies with the fact that it was originally developed for VMware Workstation  — while the VI codebase was almost exclusively developed for ESX.  Naturally, this means VI was designed with enterprise features, while VIX recently started supporting ESX with their latest version 1.6.2.  Why use VIX?  Simple.  It’s a very easy way to control programs *inside* the guest OS of the VM.  By using VIX, you can tell the VMware Tools daemon to copy a file, run a program, and even launch a browser.  It all sounds great — until you start trying to use VIX.  So far, I’ve found two major problems:

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