Category Archives: VMWare

VMware, ESX | CLI Cheatsheet

Quick guide / cheatsheet with various ESXCLI commands specifically for ESX 7.0+

Enter maintenance mode:

esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable true

Exit maintenance mode:

esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable false

Restart management agents “ESXi host daemon” and “vCenter Agent” services:

/etc/init.d/hostd restart
/etc/init.d/vpxa restart

Restart management agents “All”:

services.sh restart

Reboot Host:

esxcli system shutdown reboot --reason Upgrades

Reference: 

Restarting the Management agents in ESXi (1003490) (vmware.com)

VMware “TPM 2.0 device detected” | Dell PowerEdge

When deploying new ESX (v7.0.2 Ud) on new Dell PowerEdge (R350) server the following message appears after the installation of ESX and adding to vCenter


It appears that you can’t deploy out the box with a TPM tweak in the BIOS to allow clearing this error.
I placed the iDRAC console into “BIOS boot mode” (to save faffing about pressing “F8,F2,F5” keys, whichever one it is) before rebooting.

System BIOS -> System Security | Enable “Intel(R) TXT”

System BIOS -> System Security -> TPM Advanced Settings | Enabled “SHA256”

After a reboot of the host, the error can be cleared back in vCenter

Note: The server is not currently using “Secure Boot”

VMware ESX 7.0.2 | 503 Service Unavailable

Issue with unresponsive ESX host (Running v7.0.2) in vCenter (Shows disconnected), all VMs are still running on the host and can access ESX UI directly (IP/DNS).

Trying to resolve I complete the following:

  • iDRAC to ESX direct console
    • Enable SSH (This provides a backup to access with CLI)

SSH to ESX console and restart management agents

/etc/init.d/hostd restart
/etc/init.d/vpxa restart

After restarting the management agents the ESX GUI becomes inaccessible with the following error: 

503 Service Unavailable (Failed to connect to endpoint: [N7Vmacore4Http16LocalServiceSpecE:0x000000eb77f04cd0] _serverNamespace = / action = Allow _port = 8309)

After some searching on the internet I find this vmware KB: 2144962 which looks promising however… there is no/ui local 8308 redirect allow” in the endpoint.conf file so this doesn’t apply. I also compare the contents of “endpoints.conf” files with another ESX host and they are identical.

cat /etc/vmware/rhttpproxy/endpoints.conf

Double check that all services are running on the ESX host:

/etc/init.d/hostd status
/etc/init.d/vpxa status
/etc/init.d/rhttpproxy status

Both hostd & vpxa status is “stopped” after starting this again and waiting the GUI finally displays (After a few minutes….)

/etc/init.d/hostd start
/etc/init.d/vpxa start

Investigating further with the use of “esxtop” it indicates that the CPU & memory is heavily over commited which is what possibly prevented the “restart” services command from working correctly. The host is currently used at a branch office with only 3 low resource required VMs running. I’ve also seen this same behavior on other high performance ESX hosts which I believe is either related to the build “VMware ESXi, 7.0.2, 17867351” or potentialy the “Dell EMC iDRAC service module v4.2.0.0

After finding a patching window to reboot the host and apply a later build “VMware ESXi, 7.0.2, 18538813” I have yet to experience the same issues.

Note: I’ve also had the same issue whereby I was unable to SSH or GUI into the ESX. In this scenario I ended up having to reboot the host from the iDRAC. Fortunately this was at smaller site locations and RDP to the VMs was still available so they could be cleanly powered down through Windows before a hard reset of ESX.

VMware vMotion Connectivity

I always forget the syntax for checking vMotion connectivity between hosts…

Simply put we need to ping specifically from the vMotion network to confirm any vMotion issues.

Display network interfaces (will give you the name)

esxcli network ip interface list |grep -E 'vmk|Netstack'

Check connectivity from vMotion network

ping -I vmk2 -S vmotion IPADDRESSHERE

VMware ESX 6.0 to 6.5 Upgrade | vSphere CLI commands

I’ve been working on a project to upgrade vCentre from 6.0 to 6.5. This meant that multiple Dell (R530, R630, R730) hosts required an update of ESX (using Update Manager). Unfortunately these upgrades failed (first time around) due to the custom VIBs within previous Dell Customized Images of ESXi conflicting with native drivers within ESX6.5. Below is the cheat-sheet of commands to remove these. 

vSphere CLI commands. These can be executed by enabling SSH on ESX host and connecting via Putty

List VIBs (Matching “QLC”)

esxcli software vib list | grep QLC

List VIBs (All)

esxcli software vib list

List VIBs (Network) (Check you don’t disconnect yourself)

esxcli network nic list

Remove VIBs (example scsi-mtip32xx-scsi)

esxcli software vib remove -n scsi-mtip32xx-scsi

Host Maintenance Mode

esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable true

Host Reboot (Needs to be in maintenance mode)

esxcli system shutdown reboot --reason Upgrades

Notes: The vSphere CLI has been superseded by PowerCLI. PowerCLI is distributed as a Windows PowerShell snapin (PowerCLI 6.0 introduced PowerShell module), and includes over 500 PowerShell cmdlets for managing and automating vSphere and vCloud, along with documentation and samples. 

Reference: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/5.5/com.vmware.vsphere.upgrade.doc/GUID-7FFEBD91-5D82-4E32-93AB-F10D8BFFECAA.html

VMWare | “Unable to locate the required Sysprep files”

Yes the year is 2016! and Yes we are still converting Server 2003 onto VMware! (I know Server 2003 is dead and 13 years behind the times, but there are still some instances in our organisation that still require it for old bespoke software that can’t be easily moved to Server 2013/2016)

When converting a physical “Server 2003” machine to a virtual machine using VMware Converter this error displays:

“Warning: Unable to locate the required Sysprep files. Upload them under ‘C:\ProgramData\VMware vCentre Converter Standalone\sysprep\svr2003’ on the Converter server machine. See ‘Help’ for more details”

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Veeam Backup | Benchmarks

I’ve been using VMWare converter and Veeam Replication for a while now but still ask myself the question of “How long will this take to migrate or P2V”

Here’s some results to help with the expected performance…

1 VM Move – Server to Server on LAN (1GBPS Switch)

1 VM Restore – Reverse Incremental Backup on iSCSI to Server on LAN (1GBPS Switch)

VMware | “You cannot use the vSphere Client to edit the settings”

After carrying out a re-install of ESXi 5.5 and attaching the VMs the “edit settings” are unavailable.

“You cannot use the vSphere Client to edit the settings of the virtual machines of version 10 or higher.

User the vSphere Web Client to edit the settings of this virtual machine”

As vCentre wasn’t in place for this scenario the workaround was to directly edit the VMs .vmx file.

  1. Load vSphere Client
  2. Select VM: “Remove from Inventory”
  3. Select Storage: “Browse Datastore”
  4. Select VM Folder: Locate/Download “.vmx” file (approximately 3/4 KB)
  5. Edit in Notepad
  6. Modify the “virtualHW.version = “10” to “8”
  7. Upload “.vmx” file back to VM Folder
  8. Select “.vmx” and “Add to Inventory”
  9. VM should now be editable.

 

VMware | Enable SNMP

Although SNMP traps can be configured within Windows VMs installed on the VMWare host it can also be configured to report directly from ESXi. This configuration helps monitoring software such as Solarwinds or Spiceworks.

Configure ESXi SNMP via CLI (with Prompts):

Download/Install: VMware vSphere CLI 5.1

@echo off
echo Enter the FQDN of the host:
set /p hostname=
echo Enter the root password:
set /p password=
set user=root
"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin\vicfg-snmp.pl" --server %hostname% --username %user% --password %password% -c ESX -t 200.200.200.200@161/ESX --enable
"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin\vicfg-snmp.pl" --server %hostname% --username %user% --password %password% -show >> c:\ESXi_SNMP.log
pause

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