cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Did you know VxDMP remote CLI allows management of multiple hosts at the same time ?

Hari_Krishna_V
Level 3
Employee

The standard administration of a VMware vSphere environment is typically performed using the vSphere client UI, but some of the advanced functionality and automation can only be done using custom scripts that use the remote command line interfaces.

The VxDMP command-line packages can be obtained from the installation media or downloaded from VxDMP UI as shown below

cli_download.JPG

 

VxDMP for VMware follows this philosophy and provides the familiar and widely-used cross-platform administration command line interfaces for the VMware ESX environment as well. The VxDMP commands can be executed from any Linux or Windows host that has the VxDMP command line administration package installed on it.

cli.JPG

The command line interface has also been enhanced for VMware environments to allow execution of a command simultaneously on multiple ESX hosts running VxDMP. The vSphere administrator can chose to specify the host names as a comma separated command argument or set the ESX_HOST_NAMES environment variable that is valid for the command-line shell.

cli_vcenter_auth.JPG

 

The vSphere administrator can use direct ESX host based authentication or vCenter based role based access control based authentication with the remote command-line interfaces. However the latter does provide the advantage of allowing a single one time authentication for multiple ESX hosts which are connected to the same vCenter, across multiple CLI executions within the command-line session which expires on 10 minutes on inactivity.

Once the administrator has authenticated, the vCenter based authentication offers the experience of a parallel remote command-line execution with multiple ESX hosts and commands can be issued as though they are being executed locally.

The vSphere administrator can make use of the multi-host option to obtain information of a shared entity (such as a storage array) from all the ESX hosts that share it. This is a powerful tool for use cases such as

  • Obtain current I/O activity to a storage array from multiple ESX hosts

cli_hba_iostat.JPG

 

  • Obtain current I/O activity to a storage array port from multiple ESX hosts

cli_port_iostat.JPG

 

  • Setting policies or tunables consistently across multiple ESX hosts

cli_set_tunable.JPG

 

Also in case the administrator is migrating from a physical infrastructure to a VMware virtual infrastructure, since the VxDMP commands are consistent in physical and virtual environments, the existing custom tools and automation that has been built to carry out complex operations across hosts in the data center can be easily applied to the VMware virtual environments.

I would like to know how VxDMP has helped you to easily migrate to VMware virtual infrastructure and to manage the data center complexity using the custom tools that make use of VxDMP remote command-line interfaces.

Read more...