vSphere 5 - 2

vSphere supports several command‐line interfaces for managing your virtual infrastructure including the vSphere Command‐Line Interface (vCLI), a set of ESXi Shell commands, and PowerCLI. You can choose the CLI set best suited for your needs, and write scripts to automate your CLI tasks.

The vCLI command set includes vicfg- commands and ESXCLI commands. The ESXCLI commands included in the vCLI package are equivalent to the ESXCLI commands available on the ESXi Shell. The vicfgcommand set is similar to the deprecated esxcfg- command set in the ESXi Shell.

You can manage many aspects of an ESXi host with the ESXCLI command set. You can run ESXCLI commands as vCLI commands or run them in the ESXi Shell in troubleshooting situations. You can also run ESXCLI commands from the PowerCLI shell by using the Get-EsxCli cmdlet. See the vSphere PowerCLI Administration Guide and the vSphere PowerCLI Reference.

The set of ESXCLI commands available on a host depends on the host configuration. The vSphere Command‐Line Interface Reference lists help information for all ESXCLI commands. Run esxcli --server <MyESXi> --help before you run a command on a host to verify that the command is defined on the host you are targeting. You can use this link to get your copy of the VMware ESXi 5.1 Reference Poster. 

vSphere 5.0 U1 Release Notes

vCenter 5.0 U1 Release Notes

• Guest Operating System Customization Improvements

View 5.0.1 Release Notes

• PCoIP-enabled View Client for Mac OS X 
• Client SSL requirement
  
  

vCD 1.5.1 Release Notes

• Firewall rules can be configured with CIDR blocks, IP ranges, and port ranges
• Added system notification for lost connection to AMQP host
• Enhanced cell management tool and log collection script
• Support for AES-256 encryption for VPN tunnels
• Increased the retention maximum for vCenter Chargeback history

SRM 5.0.1 Release Notes

• Forced failover to allow you to recover virtual machines in cases where storage arrays fail at the protected site
• Added support for IP Customization of Ubuntu
• VMware VSA Support (Virtual machines that reside on the vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) can be protected by SRM 5.0.1 using vSphere Replication (VR). VSA does not require a Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) to work with SRM 5.0.1)

vShield 5.0.1 Release Notes

• Enhanced reporting and export options
• New REST API calls
• Improved audit logs
• Simplified troubleshooting
• Improved vShield App policy management 
• vShield App High Availability enhancements
• Enablement of Autodeploy (Stateless ESXi)
  
  

Configuration Manager 5.5 Release Notes

• vSphere Guest Summary dashboard
• Virtual Environments Change Management dashboard
• Virtual Environments Compliance Posture dashboard (previously named Security Posture)
• Cloud Infrastructure Suite Integration (CIS) tree

Chargeback Manager 2.0.1 Release Notes

• Upgraded the Apache Tomcat server to version 6.0.35
• vCenter Chargeback Manager fails to validate XML API requests
• Upgrade fails with database connection error
• Usage of some of the computing resources are reported as zero
• Enhancements to the vCloud Director Data Collector
• Enhancements to the VM Instance Cost job
• Report schedule generates duplicate reports

Heartbeat 6.4 Update 1 Release Notes

• Support for vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1
• The ability to install vCenter Support Tools 

IBM System Networking Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V is a highly manageable, distributed virtual switch for VMware vSphere 5.0 Enterprise Plus environment. IBM DVS 5000V provides advanced networking features and troubleshooting features, which make it ideal for deployments in large-scale Server Virtualization and Cloud environments. The IBM DVS 5000V appears as a standard network switch, which enables network administrators to configure and manage the distributed virtual switch as a regular physical switch using familiar IBM switch user interfaces. 

ESXCLI commands are a comprehensive set of commands for managing most aspects of vSphere. In vSphere 5.0, this command set has been unified. Eventually, ESXCLI commands will replace other commands in the vCLI set.

esxcli command

esxcli fcoe

esxcli hardware

esxcli iscsi

esxcli license

esxcli network

esxcli software

esxcli storage

esxcli system

esxcli vm

For a consistent look and feel for both local and remote CLI administration, the new “esxcli” command provides the ability to format the command output. Using the “--formatter” option, administrators can choose to have the command output formatted as XML, a key-value pair or a list of comma-separated values. The “esxcli” formatter enhances your ability to parse command output, helping to simplify scripting and improve report generation. In addition, you can specify which fields to include in the output. In the following example, we need to generate a report showing all the storage volume names with their free space. We start by running the storage filesystem list command, as follows: esxcli --formatter=csv storage filesystem list

The output gives us the information we need, but it is very verbose, requiring the user to use the scroll bar to see the data for all the volumes. Because we need only a summary showing the volume name and free space, we can refine our command using the --formatter and --format-param options, as follows: esxcli --formatter=csv --format-param=fields="Free,VolumeName" storage filesystem list

More information about the ESXCLI command can be found at this link.