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!