VMware ESXi - vmkvsitools

This blog article is about a very useful command master command with the name vmkvsitools which can retrieve specific information about the host and ESXi processes. The name is a short name for “VMkernel Sys Info Tools”. Sounds interesting? Let’s dig into it.

You find vmkvsitools under /usr/sbin/vmkvsitools. Vmkvsitools includes the below shown 16 subcommands which are a link to /bin/vmkvsitools (/bin is a link to /usr/sbin). That means you don’t have to put vmkvsitools in front of these commands. I am sure certain ones you have seen before like ps, vdf, update etc. but you eventually never knew that they were part of vmkvsitools. First let’s see what the command has when using help.

~ # vmkvsitools -h

usage: -h [options] [function] [arguments]

      or [function] [arguments]

Options:

  --cache, -c    Perform the operation on a given VSI cache file

Functions:

  lspci

  ps

  hwclock

  vmware

  irqinfo

  bootOption

  amldump

  pci-info

  pidof

  userspaceof

  vdu

  lsof

  vdf

  pkill

  pgrep

  uptime

Please follow the link to find out about these functions.