notes on accessing vmware esxi remotely

Notes on monitoring ESXI 6

SSH remote access

1. Generate public/private keys. For more information, see the OpenBSD Reference Manual section in the OpenBSD.
   
   Note: The preceding link was valid as of June 22, 2016. If you find the link to be broken, provide feedback on the article and a VMware employee will update the article as necessary.
   
   Notes:
   • These instructions generate two files in ~/.ssh: id_rsa and id_rsa.pub.
   • In ESXi 5.x, the ssh-keygen command is located at /usr/lib/vmware/openssh/bin.
      
2. On the remote host, store the public key content, id_rsa.pubin ~/.ssh/authorized_keys.
   
   Notes:
    
   • For ESXi 5.x, 6.0 and 6.5, the authorized_keys is located at: /etc/ssh/keys-<username>/authorized_keys
   • More than one key can be stored in this file.
      
3. To allow root access, change PermitRootLogin no to PermitRootLogin yes in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file.
4. To disable password login, ensure that the ChallengeResponseAuthentication and PasswordAuthentication are set to no.
5. Reload the service:
    
   • For ESXi, run the command:
     
     /etc/init.d/SSH restart
      
   • For ESX, run the command:
     
     service sshd reload

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1002866

Accessing process information (ps command)

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1010993

1. Run the minimalized ps command:
   ps -Tcjstv
   The output shows information such PID, command-line used, and state.
   
2. To generate output for certain processes and maintain a title row, run this command:
   
   ps -Tcjstv | egrep "WID|{proc-name}"
   
3. The esxcfg-info command can offer some detail on process memory and CPU and is contained in the vm-support dumps. Process information in esxcfg-info is contained in sections called Groups, but the groups can be cumbersome to sift through.
   Grep these groups for information on process memory and CPU with the command:
   esxcfg-info | egrep -A85 "Group Id" | egrep "Group Name|Group Id|Total CPU|Total Memory|Used Time|Parent Id|----Active\.\.\.\." | less
   
4. To check for file-system issues, run this command:
   
   stat –f {filesystem}
   
   Note: This checks inode use, from which a runaway process can sometimes be determined (even if you do not know exactly what files are involved).
   To check across all filesystems, run this command:
   
   stat -f `df | grep -v "Filesystem" | awk '{print $6}'` | egrep "File|Inodes"
   
5. To view network connection (socket) details, run this command:
   
   esxcli network connection list
   Note: For ESXi 5.x and later, run this command:
   
   esxcli network ip connection list

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