introduction
Welcome to the first article of ESXcli tool series
In first article we will get an introduction to tool ESXcli , before see how to use it to manage all vSphere resources [ Network , Storage ….etc ]
what is ESXcli
as system administrator : we prefer to use ESXI web interface to manage ESXI resources for each server alone
and later we convert to use vcenter VCSA to manage ALL vsphere resources from central administration point
BUT ….
sometimes we have to command line if we have some issue with ESXI web interface or vcenter application in previous articles we have seen how to use command ESXtop to monitor vSphere resources
this article we will discuss how to command line ESXcli to manage and configure resources
so…. what is ESXcli ?
esxcli is a new CLI (commandline interface) framework in vSphere that provides a modular for various components called namespaces (which running in the VMkernel)
ESXcli namespaces
ESXCLI in version 6.7 has 15 namespaces:
- device – Device manager commands
- esxcli – Commands that operate on the esxcli system itself allowing users to get additional information.
- fcoe – VMware FCOE commands.
- graphics – VMware graphics commands.
- hardware – VMKernel hardware properties and commands for configuring hardware.
- iscsi – VMware iSCSI commands.
- network – Operations that pertain to the maintenance of networking on an ESX host. This includes a wide variety of commands to manipulate virtual networking components (vswitch, portgroup, etc) as well as local host IP, DNS and general host networking settings.
- nvme – VMware NVMe driver esxcli extensions
- rdma – Operations that pertain to remote direct memory access (RDMA) protocol stack on an ESX host.
- sched – VMKernel system properties and commands for configuring scheduling related functionality.
- software – Manage the ESXi software image and packages
- storage – VMware storage commands.
- system – VMKernel system properties and commands for configuring properties of the kernel core system and related system services.
- vm – A small number of operations that allow a user to Control Virtual Machine operations.
- vsan – VMware Virtual SAN commands
where ESXcli command stored
ESXcli command stored at /bin folder
you can use the following command to check path command
which ESXCli
how to run ESXcli commands
we can run ESXcli commands by one of two methods :
- direct shell : open DCUI > press F1
- remote shell with Putty : which require to enable SSH [port 22]
conclusion
this was an overview of ESXcli command line
next artiles of ESXcli series we will focus on most useful namespaces of ESXcli to configure , manage , and troubleshooting ESXI host
