Handy Tips – VMWare

The other day I was working with junior engineer to deploy a green field infrastructure for a client, pretty simple all new infrastructure consisting of 2 switches, 3 servers and a SAN, however the Engineer was struggling with getting ISCSI to work. When I started asking him questions I quickly found he’d never thought of trying to ping the iscsi interfaces to check that side of the network was all functional.

I got him to ping ICSCI interface from the VMkernel interface “vmk2” the command looked something like this

esxcli network diag ping –I vmk2 –H 10.10.200.52

Below I’ve included the options with this command to help with specifying things like the outgoing interface, selecting ipv4 or ipv6 and the size of the payload.

–count | -c

Specify the number of packets to send.

–debug | -D

VMKPing debug mode.

–df | -d

Set DF bit on IPv4 packets.

–host | -H

Specify the host to send packets to. (required)

–interface | -I

Specify the outgoing interface.

–interval | -i

Set the interval for sending packets in seconds.

–ipv4 | -4

Ping with ICMPv4 echo requests.

–ipv6 | -6

Ping with ICMPv6 echo requests.

–nexthop | -N

Override the system’s default route selection, in dotted quad notation. (IPv4 only. Requires interface option)

–size | -s

Set the payload size of the packets to send.

–ttl | -t

Set IPv4 Time To Live or IPv6 Hop Limit

–wait | -W

Set the timeout to wait if no responses are received in seconds.

–help

Show the help message.

I hope this helps with ISCSI Troubleshooting for anyone who runs into issues.