Free VMware Transition to ESXi Essentials course

I recently completed the free VMware Transition to ESXi Essentials course. If you’d like more information on how to sign up for this course yourself, check out the following link: http://blogs.vmware.com/esxi/2011/04/become-a-true-esxi-expert-with-the-new-free-vmware-elearning-course-and-ebook-offer.html

I wanted to share a few specific things I learned from the training. If the price tag (free) isn’t enough to entice you to sign up, hopefully the following details will.

Module 4 of the training discusses using the vMA and goes into specific detail on vifp addserver, mcli.pl and vicfg-hostops. I’ve used one of these commands before, but learned something about it; the other two commands were new to me — but I’m sure I’ll be using them soon.

–vifp addserver: I’ve used this command several times before. Once you have servers added with fastpass, you can issue commands to the host without providing credentials. What I didn’t realize, but learned from the course, is that vifp addserver creates local accounts on the ESXi host. I verified that several of my ESXi hosts still have these users hanging out.

–mcli.pl: located in /opt/vmware/vma/samples/perl; allows running the exact same command against a list of ESXi host names. I have not tried yet, but I would assume this could be used to enable CDP for a virtual switch on all hosts in a cluster (see http://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/virtualization/update-to-enabling-vswitch-cdp-vma-4-1/ for CDP syntax)

–vicfg-hostops: allows hosts to be put into maintenance mode (with -o enter) or removed (with -o exit) from within the vMA. This would be helpful when using vihostupdate to deploy a bundle. Normally I turn this into a 2 console operation…now I can do it all from the command line!

This module also shared the link to a PDF worth keeping around — vSphere Command-Line Interface Installation and Scripting Guide.

This is just a sample of the ~3 hours worth of quality content. I’d recommend any VMware administrator find the time to sit through this eCourse presentation.