CLI-based integration is a popular and inexpensive way to integrate Oracle VM into your own applications. It is far easier and faster than using the Web Services API, and for smaller integrations is a very good option.

Since it is possible to configure the CLI to return information in XML format, it is easy to develop applications that are capable of parsing the results of any command issued to the CLI. Set the output mode using the set command.

The connection information is cached on the Oracle VM Manager host for 15 minutes, so subsequent calls with the same login credentials are faster than the initial connection.

You can write your own CLI scripts and take advantage of all the rich constructs that the operating system shell provides: variables, looping, conditional execution, parsing, and so on.

An easy way to integrate with Java is to use the exec method within the Runtime class, then parse the XML output with an XML parser such as SAX.

Equally, scripts may be written using Python along with an XML parser such as LXML. An SSH library such as Paramiko may assist in the development of tools that can be used remotely.

The CLI does not support regular expressions. If you want to use regular expressions, you should use them in your script that calls the CLI.