Some useful commands for ESXi

We can use df -h command to get the file system usage.

When can we use it-Most of the time I had to use it to check the file system usage on vCenter appliance.

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We can use find command to find files in the ESXi or vCenter file system

In my below example I have used it to find all the vmx files

Ex

find / -name *.vmx

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We can use cat command to open a file and read the data

In my below example I have opened one of the main log file(vmkernel.log) using cat viewer

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We can use grep command to search something inside the file

In my below example I used grep commands to find logged errors in the vmkernel.log

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We can use ps command to fine running vm’s process

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How to configure iSCSI on vSAN

iSCCI is one of the best option where we can use our vSAN datastore from outside. We an configure our vSAN enabled ESXi hosts as iSCSI target.This help us to configure guest level clustering also.

Login to vCenter

Select the cluster

Select Configure

Click on edit button which in line with vSAN iSCSI Target Server option under vSAN services configuration

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Select vmk0 adapter from Default iSCSI net(Here I have selected my default management network)

I’m using default port(3260)

I’m not using authentication for this lab setup.

Also I have selected default vSAN policy

Continue reading “How to configure iSCSI on vSAN”

How to use VMDK sharing for Guest OS clustering

Operating system clustering is one of the major and popular high availability mechanism in system infrastructure products. Advantage of the os clustering is it can identify the application level failure.

As a systems administrators most of the time we may need to work with MS windows failover clusters. Most of the file servers and SQL clusters are depend on this failover cluster technology. Most of the situation one of the main requirement is this failover cluster is shared lus/disk. Earlier most of the time we sued to have minimum two physical servers for this cluster operation which is directly connect to SAN device(Shared storage). But to get the benefits of virtualization platform and reduce the cost , now we have to use same cluster features on top of the virtualization platform.

1. In my below example Im using two test virtual machines.

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2. Now we need to add new scsi controller per this vm


Continue reading “How to use VMDK sharing for Guest OS clustering”

How to increase disk space of vCenter appliance

vCenter appliance is a vm and most of the time we are running it on the same ESXi cluster.

In some cases we may need to increase the disk capacity of some partition(most of the time its log file path).If our vCenter is running out of disk space, vCenter related services may not tart as expected. To resolve this issue we need to increase the free space capacity of the vCenter appliance.

How to do this

Continue reading “How to increase disk space of vCenter appliance”

Configure backup & restore vCenter 6.7

This is a very useful feature when its working with changes.This is the easiest way to restore our vCenter.

As a destination backup media we need to have http,https,ftp or ftps server. Since I had windows server. Just I add web roles with ffp feature sfrom server manager.

Once I completed that process. I have to do the following configuration on windows server.

Open Internet information service manager

clip_image001 Continue reading “Configure backup & restore vCenter 6.7”

Migrate vCenter 5.5 windows implementation to vCener 6.5 appliance

First of all we need to run Migration Assistance tool from vCenter 5.5 server. To do this we can mount the vCenter 6.7 installation media to the computer.

Inside the ISO file we can locate migration assistance in the folder migration-assistant

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This exe will prompt for sso admin password Continue reading “Migrate vCenter 5.5 windows implementation to vCener 6.5 appliance”