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Raising the vExpert & Community Bar, Part JC (John Troyer)

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Some may call him a medical practitioner, some may refer to him as Cloud City's VMware Architect and others may know him as the VMware Stig ...

but all we know is he is the Great John Troyer!

First off I would like to wish John a Happy Birthday today and hope you have a vAwesome day!

Christopher Kusek, who you may know him as cxi on Twitter reached out to the vExpert community about a month ago regarding a secret embargoed project. We wanted a way to show John our appreciation and all the hard work and dedication he has done for the VMware and virtualization community. What better way than a bunch of blog posts thanking John from the vExpert crew!

I have known John for about three years now and have interfaced with him on many occasions from late night twitter DMs on vSpam in the VMTN blog, access to new VMware betas and embargo briefings, VMTN community forum feedback/improvements and access to VMware engineers for variety of Q/A and bug related questions.

For those of you who do not know John Troyer, he is the social media strategist for VMware, but John really does way more than that. He takes part in supporting the popular VMware Community Forums, VMTN Blogs and PlanetV12n along with several other individuals, he runs the extremely well known VMware Community Podcast every week in which he invites guests from all over to discuss all things VMware and virtualization and he is also the guy who created and runs the VMware vExpert program just to name a few.

John is a very genuine guy and really likes to help others whether it's getting someone in touch with a VMware product manager for more details about a topic or helping a fellow blogger attend a VMworld conference through a blogger's pass because he/she could not afford to attend. I think John has definitely raised the bar not only in the changes to come for the vExpert program of 2011 (which I am personaly excited about) but the VMware community bar as well.

I can not think of a single technology company that has such a great user community with an incredible amount of sharing and collaboration than the VMware/virtualization community. I think part of the reason why our community is so successful is due to people like John who fosters an active communication with the user base.

Cheers to all of John's achievements, his hard work has not gone unnoticed or unappreciated. I would like to personally say Thank You!

How to Add a Splash of Remote Color to ESXi Shell

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This morning I noticed a very interesting retweet by fellow vExpert Wil van Antwerpen from another vExpert: Richard Cardona (You may know him as rcardona2k on the VMTN Community Forums) about a neat little trick with the use of remote ESXi Shell (previous known as remote TSM).

For those of you who login remotely via SSH to the ESXi Shell (previously known as unsupported mode and Tech Support Mode) know that you can run the DCUI utility remotely by just typing "dcui". The remote DCUI works just like it does using the direct console, with the exception of displaying the famous yellow and black screen that we are familiar with.

Richard came upon a neat little trick by setting the terminal type to "linux" from the default "xterm" that the yellow and black can be enabled when using the remote DCUI.

Before launching DCUI utility, you will need to run the following command on the ESXi Shell:

export TERM=linux

Next you will just type "dcui" and hit enter

Here is an example of running remote DCUI in color on ESXi 5

Here is an example of running remote DCUI in color on ESXi 4.1

Note: As you can see this is not a new trick in vSphere 5, but has been there since 4.x days but one big change with vSphere 5 is the full resolution of DCUI which many have complained about in the past.

If you are interested in other ways of customizing the DCUI, take a look at this blog post How to add a splash of color to ESXi DCUI Welcome Screen

Don't forget to play some cool soundtrack music when using the DCUI 😉

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

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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

13.  The net-fence utility may come in handy for fenced configurations

14. A utility to play around with CIM Indication Configuration is host-ind