Now that you have a bit of knowledge of the basics in ESXi SSH commands, its time to explore the next set of commands, which will refer to useful hardware commands.
I am not going to detail each and every command, however i will explain how you can get the information you need.
ESXCLI is a very powerful command line interface (and framework) which can go deep inside the VMKernel components (called Namespaces). ESXCLI can be run directly onto the ESXi host via SSH.
To explore the available hardware commands, use this command:esxcli hardware [will return a list of all the components that can be interogated]
This command will return all the components, exactly as below:Usage: esxcli hardware {cmd} [cmd options]
Available Namespaces:
cpu CPU information.
ipmi IPMI information.
smartcard Smart card subsystem.
bootdevice Boot device information.
clock Interaction with the hardware clock.
memory Memory information.
pci PCI device information and configuration.
platform Platform information.
trustedboot Information about the status of trusted boot.
Now lets say you want to find more information on the CPU. To do this, you will need to type in:esxcli hardware cpu [will return the syntax to use, the available namespaces and the available commands]
The above command should return something similar to the below:
Usage: esxcli hardware cpu {cmd} [cmd options]
Available Namespaces:
cpuid Information from the CPUID instruction on each CPU.
global Information and configuration global to all CPUs.
Available Commands:
list List all of the CPUs on this host.
Following the above example, to drill deeper into the CPU Namespaces, you can use, as examples, the following commands:esxcli hardware cpu list [will return a list of the CPUs in that host, with identification information like Model, Stepping, Core Speed, Cache size, etc.]esxcli hardware cpu global get [will return information like HyperThreading, CPU Threads, etc. that are global to the CPUs]
Using the above method, depending on the information you want to gather, you can drill down and explore each namespace and its component namespace to obtain the required information for troubleshooting.
Hope this was useful!
Click on this link for ESXi Commands – Basic Commands
Click on this link for ESXi Commands – System Commands
Click on this link for ESXi Commands – Network Commands
Click on this link for ESXi Commands – VM Commands
Click on this link for ESXi Commands – Storage Commands
