Unlike ESX, ESXi come with the busybox and limited command for your daily or troubleshooting operation. There were tons of commands available in ESX have been removed although this what’s make Hypervisor ESXi come with a small footprint. VMware already provided few other options for administrator to monitor, manage and do daily task for ESXi such as vMA appliance, RCLI and etc but lets not talk about this. Instead, the command I would like to talk and share today is “vmkvsitools”.

So, what’s “vmkvsitools” command can do?. Well, the most valuable thing this command can do is to print the IRQ information. If you still remember for ESX, to get IRQ information (NIC troubleshooting purposes) we could use command $cat /proc/vmware/interrupts. However, the exact command will give you nothing if you run it inside ESXi. Instead, you have to use “vmkvsitools” for the same output.

$vmkvsitools hwinfo -i

So, what else “vmkvsitools” can do?. Although, I haven’t finished yet exploring all the parameters, you can try some of the commands as I listed below :-

Usage: ‘vmkvsitools CMD option’

CMD: amldump, bootOption, hwclock, hwinfo, lsof, lspci, pci-info, pidof, ps, vdf, vdu, vmksystemswap, vmware

• eg1. “$vmkvsitools CMD -h” -> get help
• eg2. “$vmkvsitools hwinfo -p” -> print all pci device info present
• eg3.  “$vmkvsitools hwinfo -h” -> Print usage
• eg4. “$vmkvsitools lspci -p” -> print details of pci device
• eg5. “$vmkvsitools vmware -v” vmkernel version
• eg6. “$vmkvsitools vmware -l” Print release level
• eg7. “vmkvsitools hwclock -d 10/07/2010 -t 00:33:00″ Set date & time
• eg6. “vmkvsitools ps -c” Print process ID (PID) with verbose command aka ps auxwww

Well, just give a try because too much to explain here. Remember “$vmkvsitools CMD -h” for help.

ariyossss

athlon_crazy 07/10/2010, 12:41am