Showing posts with label
ESX 3.x Service Console Commands.
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Showing posts with label
ESX 3.x Service Console Commands.
Show all posts
Many of us believe "vmware -v" will show you the current version of your ESX server (With all the patches applied). This is actually not true. This command only shows the version of a component.
In ESX 3.x "vmware -v" will show you the version number of "VMware-esx-vmx"
And in ESX 4.x "vmware -v" will show you the version of "vmware-esx-vmware-release"
In addition, vCenter will show the version of your "vmware-hostd"
Please keep in mind those numbers can all be different.
You always want to know more about your servers, your network settings your storage options. "esxcfg-info" is the best place to dig things up. You want to know more about your storage? Type:
"esxcfg-info -s | less -RS"
You can check your VMFS alignment here, when the Starting sector set as 128 you know your VMFS is aligned correctly (VMFS aligned on 64KB boundary)
You can map the LUN back to your service console device. It will also show you the type of the file system on the LUN. In this case fb is VMFS
There are times we want to find out what drivers are configured to load up when VMkernel boots up.
You can find this out by typing:
"esxcfg-modele -q"
You can also check what drivers are currently loaded:
" esxcfg-modele -l"
Every time when you create a VMFS datastore, a copy of VMFS metadata will write to your LUN with following information:
- Block size
- Number of extents
- Volume capacity
- VMFS version
- Label
- VMFS UUID
You can use "vmkfstools -P -h /vmfs/volumes/LUN_Lable" to query the file system information
Note: information based on Infrastructure 3 DSA Manual
Normally when you hit a VMotion issue, or a 64 bit VM can not be power on from your 64 bit ESX server. You might asked to reboot the host and check the BIOS if HV (Hardware Virtualization) is enabled. You can check this without reboot your server
esxcfg-info | grep -i "hv support'
It will return a number between 0 to 3
-
0 is Not present
-
1 is Not supported
-
2 is disabled
3 is enabled
So in my case my server supports HV but is disabled under the BIOS.
Sometimes we will get a hardware device just won't work on ESX server. There are many different reasons for that. We'd like to first find out if the device is supported and the right device driver is loaded. You can check the HCL online, but what about you are in front of the ESX server and it does not have Internet connection?
You can check the device against vmware-devices.map file. this file is located at /etc/vmware directory on your ESX server.
Let's use a NIC on my server as an example
esxcfg-nics -l
We can see the device is Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II 5706 Gigabit Ethernet and the driver is bnx2.
Now we will chaeck this against vmware-devices.map file
grep -i "bnx2" vmware-devices.map
We can see the line "device,0x14e4,0x164a,nic,NetXtreme II 5706 Gigabit Ethernet,bnx2.o" We know the device is supported, and the loaded driver is also correct. Now we need look elsewhere for the problem.
By default, users can try to log into a Linux or in this case ESX server as many time as they want. Someone can sit there all day try to crack the password or just write up a script let it do the trick. You can change the behavior by add the following lines to /etc/pam.d/system-auth:
auth required /lib/security/pam_tally.so no_magic_root
account required /lib/security/pam_tally.so deny=3
no_magic_root
This will lock out the user after 3 attempts
(Keep in mind you might want to give more than 3 attempts before lock users out, just in case you forgot your password)
You can also setup the log to monitor it after this
To create the file for logging failed login attempts, execute the following commands:
touch /var/log/faillog
chown root:root /var/log/faillog
chmod 600 /var/log/faillog
Note: This will only work with VI3 since PAM on Redhat 5 (where ESX 4.x service console based on) does not work with those options
If you are on a ESX host service console (ESX 3.x or ESX 4.0), you want to run a quick summary on the data stores this host can see, but either don't have access to VI client or just simplely lazy to launch it, you can get that by typing
vmware-vim-cmd hostsvc/datastore/listsummary
You can got more about a specific datastore by
vmware-vim-cmd hostsvc/datastore/info datastore_name
Anyone work with ESX server would know sometimes you need to restart hostd service on the ESX server to "refresh" information on ESX. Normally we do this by typing "service mgmt-vmware restart"
However, sometimes this is not good enough. Every time you restart hostd it will map to 4 files under /var/lib/vmware/hostd/stats.
If any of those file got corrupted by any reason, restart hostd will not help. Every time when hostd restart called, the service will check if those files exist, if not it will create them before starting the service. So we can remove those files to make sure hostd service starts from scrach "rm -rf /var/lib/vmware/hostd/stats/*" Make sure you are in the right direct tory when you run the rm command especially with the -rf switch
The service console's /proc directory gives us some good information. How do I know my DRS setting for the VMs on this hosts?
less -RS /proc/vmware/sched/drm-stats
gid 0 is the resource group for the host. Check balloon and swap to monitor the host resource usage.
There are times when we need to test on all vmkernel network connections. It's own vmkernel interface, iSCSI network, NFS mounts, vmkernel network gateway. You can use one command to ping them all at once
vmkping -D
How do you know if your virtual machine's configuration file (vmname.vmx) is good? You might not find the typo in there by looking at it. And what about you have 30, 40, 50 of them on this host? You can run one command to do a quick check for you
vmware-configcheck
This command will go through all the steps necessary to power on a VM. Once it finish with all the steps it will give the VM a "PASS" tag. If you have problem with the configuration file. The problem VM will taged as "FAIL"
