I've seen a lot of blog posts as of late regarding the death of the Service Console (COS). The rumors are that ESX is going to be replace completely with ESXi. While most Widows/Vmware Admins probably don't care, us Linux/Vmware admins are less than happy as we want nothing to do with the Windows PowerShell.

So I did some poking around and ran into the Vmware Management Assistant, which is a tiny VM. Here is the official spiel from Vmware

"The vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) allows administrators and
developers to run scripts and agents to manage
ESX/ESXi and vCenter Server systems. vMA is a virtual machine that
includes prepackaged software, a logging
component, and an authentication component that supports non-interactive
login."

You can download and install it here

Documentation is here.
Basically the VMA give you a remote server that you can use to run commands against your ESX and ESXi boxes.

You can add a server to your list of managed servers with the command below. You will be prompted for your login credentials.Complete this step for all ESX and ESXi boxes.

sudo vifp addserver <servername>

To view your list type

vifp listservers

Then you can run a command against the boxes in your list, see below

vicfg-nics –server –<servername> –list 

You can also choose an execution server to run multiple commands against using the following

vifpinit <servername>

There is a lot more to the VMA, but this tip of the iceberg will get you started.