vSphere’s 6.5 release has brought about many new features and enhancements. One of the features which may have flown under the radar has to be the vSphere Command-Line Interface (vCLI) 6.5 release.
Overview
As a high-level overview, vCLI allows users to run commands from remote systems against vSphere environments. Examples of such commands would be ESXCLI, Datacenter CLI (DCLI), vifs, vicfg, and so forth. To put it another way, vCLI allows users to run all of the commands available within the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) on a system with an operating system (OS) of their choosing. This is important because it allows users to maintain their own patching levels and apply their own security policies.
ESXCLI Improvements
ESXCLI features a plethora of new commands! ESXCLI now has the ability to work with FCOE adapters and NICs, managing NIC queuing and coalescence, configuring USB pass-through settings, handing all kinds of settings for NVMe devices, and also administering vSAN’s iSCSI configuration. Some examples:
esxcli device driver list
esxcli fcoe adapter remove
esxcli fcoe nic enable
esxcli graphics device stats list
esxcli graphics host get
esxcli hardware usb passthrough device enable
esxcli hardware usb passthrough device list
esxcli network multicast group list
esxcli network nic queue filterclass list
esxcli network nic queue loadbalancer list
esxcli nvme device list
esxcli nvme device firmware activate
esxcli nvme device firmware download
esxcli nvme device log error get
esxcli software vib signature verify
esxcli storage vmfs reclaim config get
esxcli system coredump vsan get
esxcli system wbem get
esxcli vsan iscsi homeobject get
esxcli vsan iscsi status get
DCLI Additions
DCLI features quite a few new commands as well. DCLI’s commands have been extended to include monitoring and management of the VCSA in many areas such as networking, appliance health and access, performing backup and restore actions, and viewing appliance based information like uptime and version. Another area of improvement involves areas within the vCenter system such as gathering additional information regarding datacenters, networks, folders, hosts, clusters and so forth. Lastly, VM management has also been greatly bolstered to help manage a VM’s lifecycle. Some examples:
appliance monitoring
appliance vmon service
appliance networking interfaces
appliance networking dns servers
appliance health load
appliance health system
appliance health storage
appliance health softwarepackages
appliance access ssh
appliance recovery backup
appliance recovery restore
appliance system uptime
appliance system version
vcenter datacenter
vcenter network
vcenter folder
vcenter vm hardware
vcenter vm power
vcenter vm hardware memory
vcenter vm hardware cpu
Keep an eye out for an upcoming post about how to get started using DCLI in your own environment!
Supported Operating System Enhancements
There has also been some additional OS support added for the following versions:
Ubuntu 15.10 (LTS) – 64-bit
Ubuntu 16.04 (LTS) – 64-bit
Windows 10 (64-bit)
Please note that if Windows is the chosen OS for installation, a new pre-requisite has been added in the form of needing to install either ActivePerl or Strawberry Perl version 5.14 or later.
