ESX 3i Management and Best Practice.

[davidjerwood]

Basically I am after as much information about the management of ESX 3i and best practises.

I currently manage approx 18 ESX 3.5 Hosts using virtual center. I come from a windows background but over the last year of two been learning more and more about actually using ssh/putty to remote onto the hosts and to view the logs and running commands such as vmware-cmd, restarting services and killing processes.

I have now started to move towards running ESX 3i intergrated with the usb keys and am aware that alot of these functions have been lost or blocked. Although I know some can be turned back on although maybe unsupported.

So would basically like some info on what I should be doing and should not be doing on a 3i host to allow me to manage it ongoing.

Your help would be appreciated.

[michelb]

A good place to start would be http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/ESXi_management.pdf

If you have more specific questions I am sure many here would be eager to help you.

[davidjerwood]

Great, Thanks. Will review that document and post back with any additional questions.

Thanks again

[davidjerwood]

Ok, I have my VMware CLI and getting used to some of the useful commands. Just have a couple of questions.

1) What is the best way to review all the log files?

2) Using RCLI can I connect once to my VC then using the session to remote run the commands on various hosts?

3) Should I enable SSH to 3i Hosts, If yes or no! Why?

Thanks for you help.

[michelb]

General answers

1) May I suggest http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vi_pubs.html

2) I'm not sure what you mean by this, or why you would want to

3) Yes and No. Yes for remote access or if secure communication is needed. I don't use it as my LAN is not accessible externally nor does it need to be.