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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


How to Trick ESXi 5 in seeing an SSD Datastore

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In vSphere 5, there is a new feature called Host Cache which allows a user to offload the virtual machine's swap onto a dedicated SSD device for better performance. This is done by creating a VMFS volume on an SSD device which is then detected by SATP (Storage Adapter Type Plugin) and allows a user to add and configure a VMFS datastore for host caching.

During the vSphere 5 beta, I was testing out various new features including Host Caching but did not have access to a system with an SSD device while updating and creating a few new scripts. After some research I found that if a default SATP rule is not available to identify a particular SSD device, that a new rule could be created containing a special metadata field specifying that it is an SSD device.

In the following example, I will take a local virtual disk (mpx.vmhba1:C0:T2:L0) in a vESXi 5.0 host and trick ESXi into thinking that it is an SSD device.

We will need to use esxcli whether that is directly on the ESXi Shell or using vMA and/or PowerCLI esxcli's remote version.

Note: The following assumes there is already a VMFS volume created on the device you want to present as an SSD device, if you have not done so, please create a VMFS volume before continuing

First you will need to create a new SATP rule specifying your device and specifying the "enable_ssd" string as part of the --option parameter:

~ # esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s VMW_SATP_LOCAL -d mpx.vmhba1:C0:T2:L0 -o enable_ssd

You can verify that your rule was created property by performing a list operation on the SATP rules:

~ #  esxcli storage nmp satp rule list | grep enable_ssd
VMW_SATP_LOCAL       mpx.vmhba1:C0:T2:L0                                                enable_ssd                  user

Next you will need to reclaim your device so that the new rule is applied:

~ # esxcli storage core claiming reclaim -d mpx.vmhba1:C0:T2:L0

You now can verify from the command line that your new device is being seen as an SSD device, by displaying the details for this particular device:

~ # esxcli storage core device list -d mpx.vmhba1:C0:T2:L0
mpx.vmhba1:C0:T2:L0
Display Name: Local VMware Disk (mpx.vmhba1:C0:T2:L0)
Has Settable Display Name: false
Size: 5120
Device Type: Direct-Access
Multipath Plugin: NMP
Devfs Path: /vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.vmhba1:C0:T2:L0
Vendor: VMware
Model: Virtual disk
Revision: 1.0
SCSI Level: 2
Is Pseudo: false
Status: on
Is RDM Capable: false
Is Local: true
Is Removable: false
Is SSD: true
Is Offline: false
Is Perennially Reserved: false
Thin Provisioning Status: unknown
Attached Filters:
VAAI Status: unsupported
Other UIDs: vml.0000000000766d686261313a323a30

As you can see the "Is SSD" field is not being populated as true where as before if you ran this command, it would display false

Now you can refresh the Storage view on the vSphere Client or you can do so from the command line by running the following command:

~ #vim-cmd hostsvc/storage/refresh

Now if you go back to the vSphere Client under "Host Cache Configuration" you should see the new fake SSD device for selection and you just need to configure it and Host Cache is enabled for this device.

This of course is probably not officially supported unless directed by VMware nor is there a real good reason for this. I personally had to go down this route for scripting purposes but if you wanted to see how Host Cache works, this is a neat trick to allow you to do so.

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

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With the new release of vSphere 5, there are lot of changes including some new CLI utilities that have not made it into the official documentation for whatever reason. Here are some handy tools that maybe useful for troubleshooting, quickly gather some information about your vSphere 5 environment or just straight up dangerous and should be used with extreme care 🙂

1. If you remember the old esxcfg-info command which provides extensive information about an ESX(i) host which was normally ran via the Service Console of classic ESX or ESXi Shell (formally TSM) on ESXi, you can now retrieve the same information by just pointing your browser to your ESXi 5.0 host using the following:

https://[hostname]/cgi-bin/esxcfg-info.cgi

This just a CGI script that runs to collect this information and displays it on the browser for convenience

You can also get the same output in XML by using the following:

https://[hostname]/cgi-bin/esxcfg-info.cgi?xml

2. Another neat trick is to generate a vm-support log bundle using your browser versus having to login to the ESXi Shell and running vm-support command. To do so, point your browser over to the following:

https://[hostname]/cgi-bin/vm-support.cgi

Once the vm-support bundle is complete, you will be prompted to download it to your local system.

3. localcli is a new utility found in ESXi Shell and works just like esxcli except it does not go through hostd for changes to be made or reflected in the UI and hostd's internal state. The main use case for localcli is if hostd crashes and you need to make a change to recover in case of an emergency, VMware built a back up tool so you would not be stuck. The use of this utility can potentially put your system in an inconsistent state, and should only be used as a last resort.

4. Another neat trick that works with both localcli and esxcli is the use of the --format option which allows you to customize the formatted output of your text. If you would like to mask the headers so you don't need to do extra parsing, you can specify the following:

localcli --format-param=show-header=false

You can also show specific fields you care about by using the csv formatter and specifying the fields of interest with --format-param:

~ # esxcli --formatter=csv --format-param=fields="Name,Virtual Switch" network vswitch standard portgroup list
Name,VirtualSwitch,
ESXSecretAgentNetwork,vSwitch0,
Management Network,vSwitch0,
VM Network,vSwitch0,
VMkernel,vSwitch1,
vmk1,vSwitch0,
vmk2,vSwitch0,

5. It looks like a memscrb utility is now included in ESXI Shell under /usr/lib/vmware/memscrub/bin

/usr/lib/vmware # /usr/lib/vmware/memscrub/bin/memscrub -h
Usage: /usr/lib/vmware/memscrub/bin/memscrub [-h] [d[pidFile]] [-s[waitTime]] [-f firstMPN] [-l lastMPN]
-h --help:      Prints this message.
-d --daemonize: Daemonizes the memory scrubber.
-s --spin:      Scrub, wait 900 seconds, repeat. To change the default value, pass in a parameter.
-f --firstMPN:  Specify first MPN to scan.
-l --lastMPN:   Specify last MPN to scan.

6. Another way to list all syslog loggers on ESXi host is using the following:

~ # /usr/lib/vmware/vmsyslog/bin/esxcfg-syslog --list=loggers
id description size rotate dest
-- ----------- ---- ------ ----
syslog Default syslog catch-all 1024 20 syslog.log
vobd Vobd logs 1024 20 vobd.log
vprobed Vprobed logs 1024 20 vprobed.log
esxupdate esxupdate logs 1024 20 esxupdate.log
hostprofiletrace Host Profile trace logs 1024 20 hostprofiletrace.log
auth Authentication logs 1024 20 auth.log
shell ESX shell logs 1024 20 shell.log
storageRM Storage I/O Control log 1024 20 storagerm.log
usb USB related logs 1024 20 usb.log
vmkeventd vmkeventd related logs 1024 20 vmkeventd.log
vmauthd VMware Authorization daemon logs 1024 20 vmauthd.log
dhclient DHCP client logs 1024 20 dhclient.log
vmksummary Log heartbeats (vmksummary) 1024 20 vmksummary.log
vmkwarning vmkernel warnings and sysalerts (vmkwarning) 1024 20 vmkwarning.log
vmkernel vmkernel logs 2048 20 vmkernel.log
hostd Hostd logs 2048 20 hostd.log
fdm Fdm logs 1024 20 fdm.log
vpxa Vpxa logs 1024 20 vpxa.log

7. There are a few new options in vmkfstools such as -N --avoidnativeclone option which allows you to leverage a NAS disklib plugin (SvaNasPlugin) if you have a supported NAS array such as snapshot cloning, analogous to VAAI for NFS. By default native cloning will be performed but if you would like to leverage the array to perform the clone operation, you will need to specify the -N option. A few other options that I have not had a chance to dig into is -M --migratevirtualdisk, -I --snapshotdisk and -e --chainConsistent option.