As much as I loathe love VMware’s PDF documentation, I always get the warm and fuzzies when I happen upon something like this. An online reference for the vSphere CLI (vCLI) commands. Enjoy!

This came up on #VMware on Freenode this weekend. Basically the concern was “How do I Backup my ESXi USB Key?” Other than ripping the USB key out of a production machine… how was the user to do this? Well, vMA and the vCLI provide a method for this:

Backing up your ESXi Configuration:

To backup your ESXi configuration you’ll be using the vicfg-cfgbackup.pl command as follows:

• Download either the vMA or vCLI
• Launch vicfg-cfgbackup.pl:
  C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin>vicfg-cfgbackup.pl –save –server 192.168.15.253 –username root –password password backup.bak
• Note: The backup will be stored relative to your user “AppData” path:
  C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\

Restoring your ESXi Configuration:

Restoring your ESXi config can be done after you have the host up and responding over the network again by using the following:

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware vSphere CLI\bin>vicfg-cfgbackup.pl –load –server 192.168.15.253 –username root –password password backup.bak

Note: You will be asked to reboot the host on restore.

Backing  up multiple hosts! – There is a script to backup multiple ESXi hosts on the VMware communities site here. Also in PowerCLI here!

[Edit: Added link to backup multiple ESXi hosts from William in the comments. Thanks William!]
[Edit 2: Added PowerCLI link from NiTRo. Site is in French, PowerCLI is not]

In trying to get used to ESXi and it’s console-less nature I’ve been forcing myself to use the vCLI or PowerCLI to do things. Along the way I’ve learned that the vCLI is generally really well though out, if different. Here is an example of this: Setting up a vNetwork Standard Switch (vSwitch) using PowerCLI and the vCLI:

PowerCLI

Steps:
1. Connect to the ESXi or vCenter server:
   Get-Credential | Connect-VIServer –Server 1.2.3.4
2. Create the new vSwitch:
   Get-VMHost –Name “ESX Host” | New-VirtualSwitch –Name “NewSwitch”

A very basic example that, no uplinks and the like, but it does show that the action is very straight forward in PowerCLI.

vCLI

This one is actually much much more complicated than the above (not really, but well…)

vicfg-vswitch.pl –add vSwitch1 –server 1.2.3.4 –username root –password yourP4ssword

Conclusion

There you go. Two one liners to add a vSwitch to your ESXi (or ESX) host. Both are simpler than I’d thought. Questions? Comments? Drop a line in the comments or hit me up on Twitter (@cody_bunch)