Basic usage of ESXCLI

[morgenstern]

Hi guys,

Sorry for being a dummy, but I am really struggling with making the esxcli work in my environment. I have two PC's with esxcli installed. On the Win7 machine I don't even know how to start the CLI and on the Ubuntu machine I do know how to start it but I am struggling with the command syntax. Basically I wanted to try to force a shutdown of a vm on one of our three hosts, but I do not know how to specify the one I want to connect to.

I started to follow the instructions here: VMware KB:    Powering off a virtual machine on an ESXi host 

But when I type:

esxcli vm process list

it asks me to specify the host.

So I tried:

esxcli vm process list 10.3.0.72

and then it complains about syntax.

Can you please point me to the right direction?

I have two 5.5 hosts and one 5.0 host.

Cheers,

Martin

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - I have moved your question to a more appropriate forum -

[morgenstern]

Well, thanks

[djswarm · Accepted solution]

The syntax you ar using would require you to first ptty/ssh into the server and then run the command.

If you want to run it remote you need the --server <taget> switch like:

esxcli --server 10.0.0.1 <some command>

[morgenstern]

Hey thanks! That's exactly the answer I've been looking for! Nice one!