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dcli and how to shutdown vCSA

dcli and how to shutdown vCSA

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Sometimes You want to shutdown vCSA or PSC gracefully, but You don’t have an access to GUI through vSphere Client or VAMI.

How to do it in CLI? I’m going to show You right now using dcli, because I’m exploring a potential of this tool and I can’t get enough.

  1. Open an SSH session to vCSA and log in as root user.
  2. Run dcli command in an interactive mode.

    dcli +i
  3. Use shutdown API call, to shutdown an appliance, giving a delay value (0 means now) and a description of disk task.

    com vmware appliance shutdown poweroff --delay 0 --reason 'Shutdown now'
  4. Enter an appropriate administrator user name e.g. administrator@vsphere.local and a password.
  5. Decide if You want save the credentials in the credstore. You can enter ‘y’ as yes.

Wait until the appliance will go down. 🙂

I know that it’s not the quickest way, but the point is to have fun.

VCSA Tools – Part 1 – journalctl. Better way for vCSA log revision.

VCSA Tools – Part 1 – journalctl. Better way for vCSA log revision.

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There’s a plenty of great CLI tools in VCSA that modern vSphere administrator should know, so I decided to share my knowledge and describe them in the series of articles.

The first one is journalctl. A tool that simplifies and quickens the VCSA troubleshooting process.

Below I’m presenting how I’m using it, to filter the logs records.

Log in to VCSA shell and run the commands below, regarding to the result you want to achive.

The logs from the current boot:

journalctl -b


The boots that journald is aware of:

journalctl --list-boots

It will show this kind of results representing each known boot:

-3 26c7f0e356eb4d0bbd8d9fad1b457808 Wed 2019-01-09 15:18:12 UTC—Wed 2019-01-09 16:58:18 UTC
-2 124d73cf46d441908db7609813e0c49a Wed 2019-01-09 17:01:08 UTC—Fri 2019-01-11 10:22:39 UTC
-1 ebf1ba1936404fb086727b61ac825d47 Fri 2019-01-11 11:22:59 UTC—Fri 2019-01-11 15:48:37 UTC
 0 bd70a6d99a7245dc9b7859c5f2a7ef6f Mon 2019-01-14 10:19:47 UTC—Tue 2019-01-15 12:38:16 UTC

Now you can use it, to display the results of the chosen boot:

journalctl -b -1


To limit the results to the given timeframe, use dates or keywords:

journalctl --since "2019-01-10" --until "2019-01-14 03:00"

or:

journalctl --since yesterday

or:

journalctl --since 09:00 --until "2 hour ago"


Limiting the logs by service name:

Get the service names first:

systemctl list-unit-files | grep -i vmware

To show only records for vpxd service in current boot:

journalctl -b -u vmware-vpxd.service


Filtering by Id (Process, User or Group):

Get the user Id, e.g.:

cat /etc/passwd | grep -i updatemgr

then:

journalctl _UID=1017 --since today


Filtering by the binary path:

journalctl -b --since "20 minute ago" /usr/sbin/vpxd


Displaying kernel messages:

journalctl -k


Limiting messages by their priorities:

journalctl -p err -b

where the priority codes are:

0: emerg
1: alert
2: crit
3: err
4: warning
5: notice
6: info
7: debug

Of course those examples don’t exhaust all the possibilities this tool has, but consider them as a usage starting point. Feel free to add new, useful examples in comments below.

That’s all for today!

dcli and orphaned VMs in vCenter Server inventory

dcli and orphaned VMs in vCenter Server inventory

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The orphaned VMs in vCenter inventory is an unusual view in experienced administrator’s Web/vSphere Client window. But in large environments, where many people manage hosts and VMs it will happen sometimes.

You do know how to get rid of them using traditional methods described in VMware KB articles and by other well known bloggers, but there’s a quite elegant new method using dcli.
This handy tool is available in vCLI package, in 6.5/6.7 vCSA shell and vCenter Server on Windows command prompt. Dcli does use APIs to give an administrator the interface to call some methods to get done or to automate some tasks.

How to use it to remove orphaned VMs from vCenter inventory?

  1. Open an SSH session to vCSA and log in as root user.
  2. Run dcli command in an interactive mode.

    dcli +i
  3. Get a list of VMs registered in vCenter’s inventory. Log in as administrator user in your SSO domain. You can save credentials in the credstore for future use.

    com vmware vcenter vm list
  4. From the displayed list get VM’s MoID (Managed Object Id) of the affected VM, e.g. vm-103.
  5. Run this command to delete the record of the affected VM using its MoID from vCenter’s database.

    com vmware vcenter vm delete --vm vm-103
  6. Using Web/vSphere Client check the vCenter’s inventory if the affected VM is now deleted.

It’s working!