Just a small ESXi Pro tip this time. I recently had a host that was experiencing issues and the management services were unresponsive. This is a major problem for troubleshooting as the esxcli commandset won’t work anymore at this stage.
Now by accident I came across a tip from the Getting Started with vSphere Command-Line Interfaces documentation over at the VMware {code} website.
On the overview of vSphere Command-Line Interfaces the various methods of managing a host are explained. And as most of you will recoginise the majority of these methods use the API. There are however some exceptions and for this article I’d like to specifically point out localcli.
WARNING!
The use of this tool comes with a big disclaimer. You should only use this tool for troubleshooting purposes and NOT to make changes to the configuration of a host as this can lead to an inconsistent system state.
At first glance the command seems to support the complete list of namespaces available in esxcli.
Usage: localcli [disp options] <namespace> <command> For help please run localcli --help Available Namespaces: device Device manager commands elxnet elxnet esxcli functionality esxcli Commands that operate on the esxcli system itself allowing users to get additional information. fcoe VMware FCOE commands. graphics VMware graphics commands. hardware VMKernel hardware properties and commands for configuring hardware. iscsi VMware iSCSI commands. network Operations that pertain to the maintenance of networking on an ESX host. This includes a wide variety of commands to manipulate virtual networking components (vswitch, portgroup, etc) as well as local host IP, DNS and general host networking settings. nvme VMware NVMe driver esxcli extensions rdma Operations that pertain to remote direct memory access (RDMA) protocol stack on an ESX host. sched VMKernel system properties and commands for configuring scheduling related functionality. software Manage the ESXi software image and packages storage VMware storage commands. system VMKernel system properties and commands for configuring properties of the kernel core system and related system services. vm A small number of operations that allow a user to Control Virtual Machine operations. vsan VMware vSAN commands
I only used localcli to do a few harmless checks. And when I knew for sure there’s no way I was going to recovery this host myself I decided to wait for VMware Technical Support to contact me.
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