IT debris

Esxcli – Listing running VMs from the ESXi shell

· Remy

Warning! Out of date content.

You can check which VMs are running on an ESXi server by using the esxcli command from the ESXi shell.

esxcli vm process list

This will only show the running VMs. You can get an overview of all registered VMs by using vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvm as I explained in an earlier post.

Running the command will output something like this for every VM running:

VM1  
World ID: 63068  
Process ID: 0  
VMX Cartel ID: 63067  
UUID: 56 4d bd 8f 8f 8d d5 18-ac 40 cc f8 95 f6 cc 44  
Display Name: Virtual Machine 1  
Config File: /vmfs/volumes/4fd6352c-89033ddd-21cb-001b21c6e4ad/VM1/VM1.vmx  
VM2  
World ID: 5778  
Process ID: 0  
VMX Cartel ID: 5777  
UUID: 56 4d bb 22 dc 31 6b d3-95 a5 94 3b 44 e6 1c 9b  
Display Name: Virtual Machine 2  
Config File: /vmfs/volumes/4fd6352c-89033ddd-21cb-001b21c6e4ad/VM2/VM2.vmx

Quite handy if you want to bring a server down and you need to make sure all VMs have been stopped when you don’t have access to the full vSphere client.