07 Jul 2011 by Simon Greaves
The vMA, or vSphere management assistant is an ovf template which can be downloaded for free from the VMware website.
The vMA has the following minimum system requirements
ESX(i) 3.5 update 2 or later
512MB RAM
64 bit Intel-VT or AMD-V compatible CPU as the vMA is a 64-bit virtual machine
5GB virtual disk size
Access to the ESX(i) host management network
An ESX(i) server or a vCenter Server can be used as a target for the vMA.
Once the vMA has been downloaded and imported into ESX(i), power it on and it will run through a setup wizard where you can set the IP address, password and SNMP settings.
When you get to the prompt, login to the vMA using the vi-admin account.
The vMA contains the vCLI command utilities which offers the vicfg-xxxxxx commands among others. These commands are located in the /usr/bin directory.
Use command --help to list all available commands.
An example command is
vicfg-nics --list --server <targetservername>
Once prompted enter the vi-admin user name and password.
This will list the available nics on the target server.
Other commands available from the vCLI include
vm-support
vm-stat
vmware-cmd
When a command is run through the vMA it is necessary to provide credentials each time for the target server. To get around this you can use to vi-fastpass command to add credentials to the vMA so that future commands will be run using these cached credentials.
To do this to two things are required.
Vifp - to add the server and credentials
Vifptarget - to specify the server that the command is run on.
Vifptarget commands
--set | -s
--clear | -c
--display | -d
--help | -h
To use vifp type
vifp addserver <servername>
Type the vi-admin user name and password when prompted
Once added use Vifptarget within the command to tell the vMA the specific host to run commands on.
So to use the earlier example of vicfg-nics type
vifptarget -s <servername>
vicfg-nics -l
Notice that there is no prompt for credentials this time.
Once the server you are running the commands against has been added with vicfgtarget -s you will be able to run all subsequent commands within this session without specifying the server name of credentials.
An alternative to vi-fastpass for automating cached credentials are session files.
Session files are Perl script files that save session credentials in an aptly named saved session file, called save_ session.pl.
Example
save_session.pl --server <servername> --user name < root> --password < password> --savesessionfile /home/vi-admin/esxsession
Once this has been saved, add it to the end of a command run through the vMA.
Example
vicfg-nics -l --sessionfile /home/vi-admin/esxsession
ESXi doesn’t save log files. When the host is shutdown, all log files are deleted so in order to be able to refer to log files after a shutdown or reboot it is necessary to consolidate the log files. This can be achieved through the vMA using vilogger.
To use vilogger, first ensure that vi-fastpass is enabled using vifp list server to list out the current vi-fastpass enabled servers, if no servers are listed use vicfg addserver < servername> and vifptarget -s < servername> to add again.
vilogger has several parameters available, an example of which are
--numrotation number of files to collect
--maxfilesize specified in MB
--collectionperiod how often to poll, specified in seconds
Example
vilogger enable --server < servername> --numrotation 20 --maxfilesize 10 --collectionperiod 10
This command will collect the following logs from the ESXi host
hostd.log
messages.log
vpxa.log
To scroll through the log files one page at a time use the more command.
Example
more hostd.log
To reset the vi-admin password, first reboot the vMA using the VMware tools and when it is starting up press a key on the grub loader screen to pause the boot, then press e to edit and add the word single the kernel command line, then continue the boot process.
Once it boots you will be at the sh-3.2# prompt, this means that the server is in single user mode.
Type the following at the prompt
sh-3.2# passwd vi-admin
Enter the new password when prompted and again to confirm. You have now reset the password and will be able to login when you reboot the vMA.
vicfg-nics | Manage physical NICs
vicfg-vswitch | Manage virtual switches
vicfg-vmknic | VMkernel NIC
vicfg-dns | Specify DNS configuration
vicfg-route | Manage default IP gateway
vicfg-ntp | Specify NTP server
-a Set the NIC to auto negotiate
-d half¦full Duplex options
-s Speed for NIC (val is 10,100,1000,10000)
-l Lists the NICS
-L Link
-A Add
-D Delete a port group
-d Delete a virtual switch
-U Remove an uplink from a vSwitch (unlink)
-Q Remove an uplink from a dvSwitch
-IP Assign IP address
-m Set MTU
-n Set netmask
Create a virtual switch
vicfg-vswitch -a
Add a port group to a virtual switch
vicfg-vswitch -A
Link an uplink to a virtual switch
vicfg-vswitch –L
Link an uplink to a distributed vSwitch
vicfg-vswitch –P -v
Set Max MTU size
vicfg-vswitch -m 9000
VLANS
vicfg-vswitch –v -P
Remove a VLAN ID
vicfg-vswitch -v 0 –P
More information on the vMA can be found in the vMA guide
Additional commands can be found over at Ray Heffer’s blog
Tagged with: vSphere Command Line
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