I just came across the following on the VMTN forum which is a very useful command in my opinion. When metadata changes for a LUN, that LUN is being locked by a host. Sometime the lock isn’t released, which can cause weird situations. In this case you would want to know which host is locking the LUN, especially when you’ve [...]

I’ve seen a lot of people picking up on the queuedepth settings lately, especially when there are QLogic adapters involved. Although it can be really beneficial to set the queuedepth to 64 it’s totally useless when one forgets about the “Disk.SchedNumReqOutstanding” setting. This setting always has to be aligned with the queuedepth because if the Disk.SchedNumReqOutstanding parameter is given a [...]

I’ve seen this happen a lot, you’ve got multiple vendor nics in your ESX hosts and for some reason the numbering is all screwed up. So the onboard nics are vmnic0 and vmnic2 the pci nics are vmnic1 and vmnic3, this can be really confusing, and even more confusing when the renumbering is inconsistent. Instead of manually editing your esx.conf [...]

Enter maintenance mode from the ESX command line: vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter Backup every running vm via vcb in just one command: for /f “tokens=2 delims=:” %%i in (’vcbvmname -h <virtualcenterserver> -u <user> -p <password> -s Powerstate:on ^| find “name:”‘) do cscript pre-command.wsf “c:\program files\vmware\vmware consolidated backup framework\” %%i fullvm Enable VMotion from the command line: vimsh -n -e “hostsvc/vmotion/vnic_set [...]

Three totally different command line tips/tricks this time: Dump a specific disk via the VCB Proxy monolithic(1 big chunk): Open a cmd and goto your VCB installation path “vcbexport.exe -M 1 -d test01.vmdk -s TestVM/TestVM.vmdk” Any swapping going on or more info on memory usage in general: Open a putty sesion to your ESX box “watch -n 1 cat /proc/vmware/sched/mem” [...]

Because I will be posting less in the upcoming weeks about problems I face at customer sites I will try to post some cool command-line tip or trick I discovered or picked up somewhere…. open ESX console ,via putty and type the following vm-support -x result: all the VMID’s also known as World ID’s, And if you’re colleagues hardly ever [...]

According to this new KB article there’s a backdoor for ESX3i: Log in to your ESX Server 3i at the console. Press Alt+F1 to switch to the console window. Enter unsupported to start the Tech Support Mode login process. Note that no text will appear on the console window. Enter the password for the root user. Tech Support Mode is [...]