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.
~ # /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.
