Following on from yesterday’s post, here is how to enter or leave maintenance mode on an ESXi host via SSH:
vim-cmd hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter
to go into maintenance mode – and to leave it:
vim-cmd hostsvc/maintenance_mode_exit
If you’re interested in other useful commands, you can see more hostsvc options by running:
vim-cmd hostsvc
This is a useful command to know as it is one of the critical steps in applying some patches to ESXi remotely.
If you need to know if a host is in maintenance mode via the command line, SSH into your server and run the following:
vim-cmd hostsvc/hostsummary | grep -i maintenance
This will return the following line (in this example the host is NOT in maintenance mode):
inMaintenanceMode = false,
To see the entire host summary printout without filtering everything apart from maintenance, run:
vim-cmd hostsvc/hostsummary
…but you’ll soon see why grep is useful here!
If you’re remotely logging in to a server to apply the latest patch but can’t remember whether you’re running 4, 4.1, 5.0 or 5.1 – and it can certainly happen when you’re managing quite a few of them remotely – there is a handy command to see which version and build number you’re actually using. After you’ve SSH’d in, run:
vmware -v
This will display output along the lines of the following:
VMware ESXi 5.0.0 build-469512
You can also use:
vmware -l
which doesn’t display the build number:
VMware ESXi 5.0.0 GA
Straightforward but very handy if you haven’t got the proper notes with you.