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Quick Tip - Using ESXi to send Wake-on-Lan (WoL) packet

03.05.2021 by William Lam // 1 Comment

The ability to power on a system over the network using Wake-on-Lan (WoL) can be extremely useful, especially if you are not physically near the system or after a power outage. I personally have been using the wakeonlan utility on my macOS system for several years now.

The syntax is super easy, you just provide the MAC Address of your system:

wakeonlan 54:b2:03:9e:70:fc
Sending magic packet to 255.255.255.255:9 with 54:b2:03:9e:70:fc

I recently came to learn that ESXi itself has the ability to send a WoL packet from the ESXi Shell! This could be handy without having to install WoL client, especially if you have access to an ESXi host.

vsish -e set /net/tcpip/instances/defaultTcpipStack/sendWOL 192.168.30.255 9 54:b2:03:9e:70:fc vmk0

This uses the not supported vsish CLI to send WoL packet. The first argument is the network broadcast address, so if you have a network of 192.168.30.0/24, then the address would be 192.168.30.255. The second argument is a value of 9, which is probably related to the magic packet as you can see the same value from the wakeonlan utility abvoce. The third argument is the MAC Address of the system and finally the fourth and final argument is the ESXi VMkernel interface to send the packet out of.

Categories // Automation, ESXi Tags // vsish, wake on lan, WOL

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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