I am starting to learn the ESXi command line tools. I posted an article on it at http://www.whiteboardcoder.com/2015/04/esxi-51-command-line.html

In this post I am trying to poke around and figure out some commands that I can use for quick diagnostics of the system.

Simple commands

I am not going into how I am going to use these, I am just going to make a quick list of commands I can figure out that I think I can reuse later to query my system's health.

List of Physical Hard drives

> esxcli storage core device list | grep t10 | grep -v ":"

Total Space in TiB of all drives

> esxcli storage core device list | grep "[[:space:]]\+ Size" | sed 's/.*: //' | awk '{ SUM += $1} END { print SUM/(1024*1024) }'

I got back 6.8 TiB. (I have a 2 TB + 1.5TB + 4 TB = 7.5TB

Remember TiB != TB.

Pretty close numbers.

Health data for all hard drives

There is a little script written for this

> /usr/lib/vmware/vm-support/bin/smartinfo.sh

Hard Drive Temperatures

> esxcli storage core device list | grep t10 | grep -v ":" | while read i; do esxcli storage core device smart get -d `echo $i`; done | grep "Drive Temp" | awk '{print $3}'

Total Memory on box

This returns the total memory on the box in bytes

> vim-cmd hostsvc/hosthardware | grep memorySize | awk '{print $3}' | sed 's/,//'

List all the IP addresses being used.

This returns the total memory on the box in bytes

`echo $i | cut -d ':' -f2` | grep -m 1 ipAddress; done

CPU information

OK I honestly could not find good details on this type of information. I could not find a simple ESX command that returns just this type of data nor a linux one, the Linux commands on the box are stripped down.

ESXTOP

There is some salvation though, esxtop. It’s a tool like top, but with specific ESX info in it. You can also run it in a batch mode and output the data to a file. This file is a giant csv file. Trying to interpret this file is a little more involved so I will do it in another post.

ESXi 5.1 Command line diagnostics

Posted on Sunday, April 5, 2015