Vmware Server CLI

If you use a Mac pretty often like I do your limited when it comes to managing a system running VMware because there is not a native VMware console that runs on OS X. And of course the GUI is kind of limiting when you have to traverse a few firewalls. On Solaris the Zone subsystem is run completely by the CLI which I find to be quite useful.

There is a rather primitive but functional CLI for VMware. If you type in vmware-cmd -h the program will display a help file. Here are a few useful examples of things you can do with vmware-cmd.

Listing your VM's is vmware-cmd -l

rchase@darthfinity:~$ vmware-cmd -l
/vmfs/Ubuntu 8.04/Ubuntu.vmx
/vmfs/Ubuntu 8.04 VM2/Ubuntu.vmx
/vmfs/Ubuntu 8.04 VM3/Ubuntu.vmx
/vmfs/CentOS VM1/Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.vmx

Of course this just lists the VM's and does not really tell us much about them. Here they are. Are they on? Are the off? vmware-cmd getstate will help answer some of those questions. And as you can see theres something to be said about short VM names without spaces.

rchase@darthfinity:~$ vmware-cmd /vmfs/Ubuntu\ 8.04/Ubuntu.vmx getstate
getstate() = on

Lets say for example we wanted to start or stop a VM. The command vmware-cmd start or vmware-cmd stop is quite useful.

Here is some more information on the VMware website.

http://www.vmware.com/support/esx21/doc/vmware-cmd.html

Foundry Switching in the Lab

Faced with a failure of a bank of ports on my Cisco 2924 upstairs and running out of ports on my 2924 in my lab I decided to get an additional switch. I decided on a Foundry EdgeIron 4802CF for my needs. The 4802CF is equipped with 48 standard copper ports and and additional two optical ports for LC fibre.

I have been adding a few QFE cards into my Sun systems to play around with IPMP and faced running out of ports completely in the near future during the deployment of my workstation lab. Additionally the two optical ports will come in handy for getting the optical network cards in my Enterprise 450 on the network.

The network guru's seem to really like Foundry gear a lot and now I know why. Setup was really straight forwards with a lot of the setup commands being very similar to Cisco IOS commands. Not to mention this switch is not taxed at all by my home network traffic which has a lot of large CIFS transfers. The 2924-xl that was removed from service is now going upstairs into my office to replace the switch with the bad ports and the old switch can be a backup in the event I need an extra switch.

Now onto installing more QFE cards and tinkering with IPMP.