The topic of VMware came up at my local 757 Python Users Group.
A common administrative need is to control VM farms. While there are a number of pointy-clicky GUI tools, VMware offers the VIX library to permit writing scripts to control VM's.
Here's some information we looked at recently on PyVIX2 and VMware.
The idea behind PyVIX2 is to provide a relatively simple Python binding to VIX. This, too, is a command-line interface, following on the heels of More Command-Line Goodness and Command-Line Applications.