VMware VIX API

To automate virtualization the primary API from VMware is VIX. This api is released for both VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation Pro, and VMware Player. But it is not included in all products. Then you have to download and install the API manually.

The VIX API documentation is available on the VMware support (link). Here there is also a reference to the tool vmrun. Maybe I will get back to this later...

Unfortunately the API is not really maintained anylonger. The last version (1.17) is from 2017-09-26. This is too long ago. Especially when you look at all the nice things you can do on Hyper-V with PowerShell CmdLets (link).
One answer could be the new REST API, but that is too limited to be usefull. I have taken a breif look at this API earlier (link).
Another API from VMware is PowerCLI, which is actually a PowerShell interface. But this API does not work with VMware Workstation. That is a really bad decision from VMware.
Not that PowerCLI is fantastic. I think that they got the basics on PowerShell somewhat wrong.
At the PowerShell Galley VMware has the module VMware.VimAutomation.Core (link). But like PowerCLI this module is only for vSphere and can then not be used with VMware Workstation.

With VMware Workstation Pro VIX is installed in the path “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\VMware\VMware VIX\„. In this folder there are three folders with documentation (doc), examples (samples) and implementations for VMware Workstation 15 (Workstation-15.0.0). The implementation on WMware Workstation is both 32- and 64-bit.
Please notice that the documentation in the local doc folder is not complete. You should use the online documentation (link).
Also the folder holds C++ code files. Actually VIX is a C++ SDK with a COM implementation. They are in the VIX folder and the Workstation subfolder.

VixCOM

There is a wrapper for the VIX COM interface on GitHub in the project VMWareTasks. The wrapper is written in and for C#. The code is 32-bit only, which might give some issues on a modern 64-bit platform.
But unfortunately this project has not been updated since 2015-11-30. This is more than a year before the last update to VIX. In my point of view this project looks somewhat cold.

COM

I can add a type in PowerShell on a VIX DLL file like
Add-Type -LiteralPath $VixFile.FullName -PassThru
But even I use the PassThru option the is neither error or type info.
After I have added a type and try to address is with
$Vix = New-Object -ComObject 'Vix.COM'
things go wrong deep inside .NET with the error "Bad IL format".

Still I have not been able to figure out how to connect PowerShell to VIX using COM.

There are a lot of Perl examples, but using Perl integrates bad with my general infrastructure automation, which is based on PowerShell.