I have a similar situation.
Due to security concerns, I have to keep my laptop updated regularly. A recent update to Chrome for OSX has broken the flash interface on vCenter v6 and the HTML 5 interface seems broken. The recommended solution from VMware is to downgrade (Shockwave Flash crashes with vSphere Web Client 6.x (2151945) | VMware KB). Not an acceptable solution from my perspective.
I need to mount an ISO image on an NFS datastore to a VM and boot to that ISO image to perform an install. Knowing the commands to issue on the ESX host would be advantageous in my situation.
Several basic steps - powering a VM on/off, etc - are already much faster in the CLI.