Practical commands for the ESXi console

For troubleshooting on ESX(i), I always end up in the console even on ESXi 5.x. There are a number of practical commands that I can usually remember, but not always. So here they are for reference in random order:

# tail -n 50 'file name'
Shows last 50 lines of a file

# tail -f 'file name'
Outputs continuously what is being written to the file

# more 'file name' | grep -C 10 'search string'
Outputs the line with the word you search for including 10 lines on each side of the entry.

# less 'file name'
A good alternative to 'more' and 'cat'. Lets you navigate back and forth with the keyboard arrows. Use 'w' for page up and 'z' for page down

# find / -name 'search string'
Search for something. Further described in this post.

# find -iname "*-flat.vmdk" -mtime +7 |  xargs ls –alh
Finds files older than 7 days and list them including when they've last been changed. See this post for more info on xargs.

Using the vi text editor. See this post.

Typen characters with ASCII code (hold the Alt key while inputting the number on the numeric keyboard). See more here.
@ - Alt+64
| - Alt+124

# esxcfg-scsidevs –a
# esxcli storage core adapter list
Both commands show info on the SCSI controller type, HBA type, WWNs. Here's more info.

# esxcfg-scsidevs –l
# esxcli storage core device list

Both commands show various info on LUNs including exact size

# esxcfg-mpath -l
# esxcli storage core path list
Shows info about the storage paths. Will show naa device id, LUN id, and state of the paths. You can grep for the word 'dead' for finding dead paths.

# dcui
Will show the yellow/grey ESXi console menu in a Putty session

# esxcli software vib list
# esxcli software vib update -v 'VIB file name'
Updates the VIB package. See here for more info

# pwd
Show working directory

# passwd
Change password for current user (can be used for root as well)

# date
Show date and time.

Locating orphaned vmdk's

When you have had a VMware environment running for several years and have had many admins interacting with this environment, there is a fair chance that there will be a number of orphaned vmdk's on the LUNs which are taking up valuable space.

I found a post on yellow-bricks.com explaining two different ways of locating these vmdk's:

The first option is to simply look for all flat files that haven't been changed during the past seven days. This is easy and it works on ESXi 5.0. However, be careful before you start deleting files as a powered off VM, for example, also will show up in such a search (as well as probably also VMs with snapshots).

# find -iname "*-flat.vmdk" -mtime +7

Alternatively, you can pipe the output of the find command to ls see when each file has been modifed:

# find -iname "*-flat.vmdk" -mtime +7 | xargs ls –alh

And if you feel very safe that all the files can be deleted, you delete them all at once:

# find -iname "*-flat.vmdk" -mtime +7 | xargs rm -f

The second option which is a more thorough way of doing it is to run a powershell script (can also be found in the post) which looks for vmdk's which are not registered to a .vmx file. The script has been slightly modified by Danni Finne and can be found here: