In this blog, we will discuss about sddc manager and what are the command line options we have what we can do in command line.
Sddc manager is the core component in VCF environment.
It is responsible for doing many different tasks related to your VCF inventory configuration, life cycle management, security etc.
- Commission/decommission the hosts
- Deploying new workload domains
- Expanding the clusters or adding new clusters to workload domain
- Configure network pools for host networks (Management, Storage(VSAN/NFS etc)
- Deploying vRealize suite of products
- Certificate and password management
- Life cycle Management
- NSX-T Edge/AVNs deployment
Usually all these tasks can be carried out from GUI, VCF admins rarely login sddc manager mostly when the VMware GSS is involved.
SDDC Manager command line provides different use cases for example:
- monitoring the logs
- looking up for passwords
- collecting logs
- do command line health checks etc
How to access sddc manager CLI?
There are two users vcf user and root user.
when we take SSH session from putty or SSH client tools , we cannot directly login with root user.
First you need to login with vcf user and then change to root.
example:
Please note that vcf user can be able to run most of the commands, change to root user only when it is necessary.
How to unlock vcf user account if it is locked out due to incorrect password attempts.
We can use pam_tally2 tool to unlock the user account.
This tool will work with root user only
Access the SDDC Manager VM virtual console and login as root there then you can run the below commands to check and unlock vcf user.
What are the different logs in SDDC Manager?
There are many logs are available in sddc manager to investigate and monitor different tasks/workflows.
Most frequently used logs are available in the below folder '/var/log/vmware/vcf'
we are not going to discuss all the logs here, we will talk about the most commonly used logs.
Lcm logs:
Lcm logs are greatly helpful to check multiple things related to Life cycle management of VCF environment.
- Bundle downloads
- Upgrade pre-check errors
- Ongoing upgrade status
- Upgrade errors
- VMware or DellEMC Depot connectivity issues
Important logs to focus here is: lcm.log and lcm-debug.log
precheck related events in lcm-debug.log
Bundle download and availability related events
Operation manager logs:
- Host commission/decommission
- Password update/remediate issues
- Certificate management
- Sddc manager and nsxt backup configuration
- Sftp server(for file backup of sddc manager and nsxt) connection issues
Logs related to host commissioning:
Logs related to backup configuration, by default sddc manager backups are configured INTERNAL, we need to configure external SFTP server to take automatic backup at regular intervals
Logs related to password rotation:
Domain manager logs:
We can check the logs for all activities related to workload domain with VCF environment in domainmanager logs
- Adding a new workload domain
- Add new cluster or delete a cluster from existing domain
- Add or remove host
- vRLCM integration
- NSX-T Edge/AVN deployment activities
Logs related to VI domain creation:
Logs related to cluster creation:
