Finding the correct esxcli command

The ESXi command esxcli has many namespaces and options to choose from. It may sometimes be hard to find what the exact command is to perform a task. You can of course use a search engine to find what you need. But with this practical tip you can also find what you need with the esxcli command itself.

First let's have a look at the command itself. When you execute the command without any parameters it will show the possible options and namespaces.

Running an Alarm Script on the vCenter Server Appliance

When alarms on vSphere are triggered by the vCenter Server there is an option to run a script. That script will run on the vCenter Server appliance in Linux. In this article I will explain how to setup the script location and permissions and will show a demonstration script.

First of all let's look at the alarm definition in the vSphere Client. In the image below you see an alarm definition for a virtual machine event. When the VM reaches the powered off state this alarm will be triggered. The script that is configured to run is: /home/vpxd/alarm.sh.

Tags:

How Reversed ARP is used for MAC learning with vSphere vMotion

When a virtual machine is migrated from one ESXi host to another the traffic for that vm has to be delivered to the destination host and no longer to the source host. How is the physical switch informed about the move? ESXi sends out a Reversed Address Resolution packet on the destination host that will trigger the physical switch to update its MAC-address table. In this article I will explain how this process works and why it is important. 

Tags:

VMware Workstation Pro: Now Available Free for Personal Use

In May 2024 VMware by Broadcom announced that their personal virtualization software is now available for free for personal use. This is for VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion.

VMware Workstation Pro: Now Available Free for Personal Use

Because these are now available for free the previous free to use software Player for both Windows and MacOS is now no longer available. 

Logging in to the vCenter VAMI with an AD account

One of my students asked if it is possible to also login to the vCenter server appliance management interface (VAMI) with an Active Directory account. The VAMI is available on your vCenter server on port 5480. After installation of the vCenter Appliance you can login with root and with administrator@vsphere.local (or a different SSO-domain name if you have entered something else than  vsphere.local).

Tags:

Export a virtual machine from vCenter in OVA-format with the VMware OVFTool

When using the vSphere Client it is only possible to export a virtual machine as a template in OVF-format. Exporting in OVA-format is not supported at the moment. This functionality has been removed since vSphere 6.5 (documentation).

It is however possible to export a virtual machine in the OVA-format with the VMware OVFtool via the command line. 

VMware product alignment explained

VMware has published this bog-post that clarifies what will happen with products that where previously available with a separate license. Some products are now available as part as VMware Cloud Foundation, vSphere Foundation or an add-on service. Other products will no longer be available. Here's the link to the blog explaining about all of this:

VMware End Of Availability of Perpetual Licensing and SaaS Services

Follow us on LinkedIn

  

   

   

Theme by Danetsoft and Danang Probo Sayekti inspired by Maksimer