Enable SSH on Multiple ESXi Hosts With PowerCLI

Enabling SSH on a large cluster of ESXi hosts through both the desktop vSphere client and the vSphere web client can be a real pain and a huge time suck.  Using VMware's PowerCLI, it's really easy to enable SSH on all hosts connected to a vCenter server with one command.

Open PowerCLI, connect to your vCenter server and run the command:

Get-VMHost | Foreach { Start-VMHostService -HostService ($_ | Get-VMHostService | Where { $_.Key -eq “TSM-SSH”} ) }

To turn it off again:

Get-VMHost | Foreach { Stop-VMHostService -HostService ($_ | Get-VMHostService | Where { $_.Key -eq “TSM-SSH”} ) }

Testing Jumbo Frames in Windows

To improve backup performance from my Veeam server to a dedicated storage appliance, I implemented jumbo frames on a NIC dedicated to backup traffic, and on the appliance.

First, use netsh to confirm the NIC is configured for jumbo frames.

 The "Backup LAN" interface shows the correctly configured MTU value of 9000.  I added the highlighting.

To test whether or not jumbo frames are working from the server to the destination use a ping command along with the -f and -l parameters.  -f tells the ping to not fragment the packets, and -l specifies the size of the ping packet.  The max size for this is actually 8972, rather than 9000, since the first 28 bytes of the packet aren't encapsulated.

A reply means that the server, destination, and everything in between are all correctly configured for jumbo frames.