As described in the vSphere Security Guide: To increase the security of your ESXi hosts, you can put them in lockdown mode. In lockdown mode, all operations must be performed…

I’ve recently written a post about how to collect data with esxtop and resxtop, but how do you interpret that data? esxtop is a great tool for troubleshooting and determining…

Using the watch command from the ESXi command line is a great way to monitor snapshot removal, as shown in this KB article. # watch -d ‘ls -luth | grep…

There are a number of ways to create users and groups on a ESXi host. The most familiar way is to use the vSphere client. You do this by connecting…

Occasionally there is a need to patch an ESXi host without using Update Manager. It may be that Update Manager isn’t installed, or that there are network restrictions in place…

ESXi has an embedded SNMP agent which allows the host to send SNMP traps and receive requests. In the examples here I will use vicfg-snmp from a vMA to configure SNMP on my…

I’ve written a post recently around creating snapshots using the ESXi CLI. Further to that, I thought I’d cover a bit on Snapshot Consolidation With vSphere 5, a new feature…

Recently, I had the need to remove some snapshots from a virtual machine using the CLI as there were issues with network connectivity. The CLI tool to do this is…

You can use the vscsiStats tool to gather storage performance data for VMFS and NFS datastores. The tool is now available on a default install of ESXi, and is located…

ESXTOP and RESXTOP are tools used to monitor and gather performance data from an ESXi host. Esxtop is a command-line tool that gives real-time information about resource usage in a vSphere…