Use Command Line Tools to troubleshoot and identify configurations items from an existing vDS (net-dvs)

What is net-dvs?

net-dvs is available to administrators from the ESXi Shell with root level access and displays information about your distributed switch configuration. The command acquires this information from a binary file named /etc/vmware/dvsdata.db.You can view this file by typing net-dvs -f /etc/vmware/dvsdata.db

Warning: This is an unsupported command. Use at your own risk

netdvs0

This file is maintained by the ESXi host and is updated at 5 minute intervals.When an ESXi host boots it will get the data required to recreate the VDS structure locally by reading /etc/vmware/dvsdata.db and from esx.conf.

How to run Commands

  • Navigate to /usr/lib/vmware/bin
  • Type net-dvs | more
  • Check out just some of the useful information highlighted to see what sort of information you can get

net-dvs2

  • You can also view performance statistics in particular dropped network packets to troubleshoot issues with networking. Just keep on scrolling down form the previous command to get to these

netdvs3

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