VxRail manager utilizes the PTAgent running on the ESXi hosts as part of a VxRail cluster in order to pull hardware related information from the host. If you are experiencing host visibility issues in VxRail manager, then a good starting point is to check the PTAgent status,
PTAgent is bundled with VxRail code releases as part of the Dell PowerEdge components. ESXCLI can be used to determine the PTAgent version running on the host.
esxcli software vib list | grep dellptagent
For a detailed overview of the VxRail Management Pack for vROps please refer to the excellent post by Steve Hegarty:
VxRail Management Pack for vROps
This post provides an example use case of working with this mgmt pack. You can see from the image below capturing the Mgmt. pack dashboard ‘Dell EMC VxRail Clusters‘, is throwing an alert in relation to a VM that has exceeded the threshold for snapshot duration (by the way this is a lab and yes it has well exceeded said threshold!):
Clicking on the alert provides detailed info (‘Symptoms’) of the alert. Click on the ‘RUN ACTION’ button in order to be presented with the options for remediation: Continue reading
Quick ‘How to’ on looking up the current running version of VxRail Manager.
Login to VxRail Manager UI:
Navigate to ‘Config’, click on the ‘General’ tab:
From CLI, ssh to the VxRail Manager:
mystic@vvdrailmgr01:~> rpm -qa | grep vxrail
vxrail-mystic-4.5.210-8392085.noarch
Note: Please refer to the DELL EMC Solve procedures before performing this task, this is for example purposes only, running VxRail code 4.5.210.
This is an example of a manual file-based backup of your VxRail Manager config, which is invaluable in the event you are required to recover the VxRail Manager.
In this example I accessed the VxRail Manager via SSH with mystic account, su to root and navigate to the backup script directory:
Access the VCSA shell and log in as a user who has a super administrator role such as ‘root’.
Begin by creating a group for the user in this example the group and user are both named ‘management’.
Use -h if you wish to expand the cmd options:
Due to repeated failed login attempts via SSH a user account may get locked out. The following provides steps on how to reset the account.
If this is the only account you have access via SSH you may need to open the VM console via ESXi/vCenter:
A very useful benefit of iDRAC Console is that it allows you access to ESXi DCUI thus providing access to the ESXi Shell. The following steps provide detail on how to gain such access to the ESXi Shell which is disabled by default. Of course there are other methods of accessing shell, but it maybe beneficial for example when all your lab VM’s are running behind a firewall and when those VM’s are down the only direct access to the host(s) is via iDRAC … from where you can manage VM’s via the ESXi Shell!
Begin by browsing to the iDRAC Console:
Enter the iDRAC creds:
