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You are here: Home / vSphere 4.1 Is the Gift That Keeps On Giving

vSphere 4.1 Is the Gift That Keeps On Giving

07.23.2010 by William Lam // 3 Comments

While doing some testing on ghettoVCB earlier this week, I noticed a new command line argument to vmkfstools utility called "--fix" in vSphere 4.1. From the man pages for vmkfstool, it states the following:


-x, --fix -[check|repair]
This option will check and/or repair the virtual disk in case of an unclean shutdown.

Here is an example of running the command against a VM's VMDK:

[[email protected] ~]# vmkfstools --fix check /vmfs/volumes/esx4-1-local-storage-1/dummy/dummy.vmdk
Disk is error free

What surprised me next while looking up this new parameter in the man pages, I discovered another new argument called "--miscop":


-J, --miscop [setuuid | getuuid]
´setuuid´ option creates a unique identifier (UUID) for the
virtual disk and stores the UUID in the descriptor file of the
virtual disk. If the descriptor file already contains a UUID,
it will be overwritten with a new one. Please make sure that the
virtual disk does not have a UUID before using this option.
´getuuid´ option displays the UUID of the virtual disk.

The "--miscop" command is listed in the man pages but is not displayed when running "vmkfstools --help".

At this point, I thought there might be more hidden commands that VMware is holding out on us. I decided to use a well known UNIX/Linux utility called "strings" which looks for printable string in files and apply that to the vmkfstools binary. After sifting through the massive output, I found the following additional command line parameters that are not documented:

  • dumpfs
  • numfiles
  • force
  • recursivelock
  • recover
  • vmfsscan
  • physicalmapping
  • logicalmapping
  • allocateblock
  • clearlazyzero
  • parseimage
  • createarro
  • createmirrordisks
  • createmultiextent
  • trackvdisk
  • activehosts

Here are some of the command syntax which I have been able to verify:

dumpfs can be used by specifying either "-D | --dumpfs" and specifying a VMFS volume, file or folder.


[[email protected] ~]# vmkfstools -D /vmfs/volumes/esx4-1-local-storage-1/

Lock [type 10c00001 offset 4292608 v 33, hb offset 3440640
gen 11, mode 0, owner 00000000-00000000-0000-000000000000 mtime 2509]
Addr <4, 0, 0>, gen 1, links 4, type dir, flags 0, uid 0, gid 0, mode 1755
len 1260, nb 1 tbz 0, cow 0, zla 1, bs 1048576

[[email protected] ~]# vmkfstools --dumpfs /vmfs/volumes/esx4-1-local-storage-1/

Lock [type 10c00001 offset 4292608 v 33, hb offset 3440640
gen 11, mode 0, owner 00000000-00000000-0000-000000000000 mtime 2509]
Addr <4, 0, 0>, gen 1, links 4, type dir, flags 0, uid 0, gid 0, mode 1755
len 1260, nb 1 tbz 0, cow 0, zla 1, bs 1048576

activehosts can be used by specifying "--activehosts" and specifying a VMFS volume


[[email protected] ~]# vmkfstools --activehosts /vmfs/volumes/esx4-1-local-storage-1/
Found 1 actively heartbeating hosts on volume '/vmfs/volumes/esx4-1-local-storage-1/'
(1): MAC address 00:50:56:92:3f:86

For the other parameters, I have not been able to figure out the additional arguments to make them work. If anyone or VMware has further insight into these other options, I would love to know what they are used for.

More from my site

  • How to automate vFRC configurations using the command-line in ESXi
  • Did you know that VMware Host Profile is extensible by 3rd Parties?
  • 2gbsparse Disk Format No Longer Working On ESXi 5.1
  • How to Create an SE Sparse (Space-Efficient) Disk in vSphere 5.1
  • Automating Dead Space Reclamation in ESXi 5.0u1

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // vmkfstools, vSphere 4.1

Comments

  1. Anonymous says

    07/25/2010 at 4:02 pm

    Cool! Thanks.

    Reply
  2. geeksilver says

    08/03/2010 at 6:38 am

    Wow. That's a amazing you can do that.
    Thank you for your info.

    http://geeksilver.wordpress.com

    Reply
  3. Thomas King says

    01/03/2018 at 9:51 am

    That just saved my bacon, thanks!

    Reply

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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