New vSphere 5 CLI Utilities/Tricks Marketing Did Not Tell You About Part 2

Continuing from New vSphere 5 CLI Utilities/Tricks Marketing Did Not Tell You About Part 1

8. There have been a few updates to the busybox utility in ESXi Shell which now includes unzip and sync utility. There were also few that were removed that used to be in ESXi 4.x: syslogd, ftpget, ftpput and chroot. If you have used these in the past, do not expect these to function in ESXi 5.0 as VMware has now removed them

9. Here are a list of other useful utilities that maybe familiar for those who work with UNIX/Linux systems that have been introduced in ESXi Shell in 5.0:

pkill
ssh (this was known as dbclient but now has an alias to "ssh")
strace
dmesg
ntp-keygen
ntpdc
ntpq
traceroute

10. *** Be very careful with this tool *** - /sbin/powerOffVms This utility does not take any arguments nor provides a help menu. It literally power offs all virtual machines residing on an ESXi host, so unless you really mean to do this, stay away from this command

11. There are two vmx utilities for troubleshooting and debugging, most likely for VMware engineers and support to use. I haven't had a chance to really look into the options but definitely try this on a VM you do not care about
/bin/vmx-buildtype

/bin/vmx-stats

12. Another potentially useful tool is memstats which provides you quite a bit of information on the various report types, here is a screenshot of the available report types