Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The VPLEX command line interface (CLI) is a bit different than a lot of other CLIs with
which I’ve worked. In some respects, it’s similar to the scope-based CLI that Cisco uses
with Unified Computing System (UCS). In this post, I’d like to explore the VPLEX CLI a bit
and provide a brief introduction to the VPLEX CLI. Keep in mind that this is just an
introduction—for a complete reference to the VPLEX CLI, I’ll refer you to the VPLEX
product area on EMC PowerLink where a complete VPLEX CLI User’s Guide is available
in PDF.
In my opinion, there are two things to know about the VPLEX CLI that will help you
1. First, the CLI is a lot like navigating a directory tree, except that you’re navigating
through contexts instead of directories. In the VPLEX CLI, you move between
contexts using the cd command and list the contents of a context using the ls and ll
commands. Just as with a typical filesystem, if you’re in the right context, you can
just run a command (say, like the unclaim command). If you’re not in the right
context, you simply specify the full context before the command (I’ll show you
2. Second, the VPLEX CLI supports wildcards and globbing, much like a typical
filesystem. Use the asterisk (*) character to represent anything in a context, and
use the double asterisk (**) to represent multiple matches across multiple
where all the various objects reside. For example, in an earlier post on VPLEX storage
volumes, extents, devices, and virtual volumes. These reside in different places in the
Within each of these contexts, you can use the ls and ll commands to view the contents of
that context. The help command will show you what other commands are available in
each context.
Here’s my first example. When you first log into the VPLEX CLI, you’ll get dropped into a
“root context”. Running ls here will produce output something like this:
VPlexcli:/> ls
Let’s take a look at a few more examples. For example, the following two sets of
cd /clusters
ll
and
ll /clusters
Remember that specifying the context in the command is the same as changing into that
context and then running the command. That is why these two commands produce the
same output.
ll /engines/*/directors
This is an example of using the asterisk to represent a wildcard that matches all entries
in that context.
Let’s look at another example of two different commands that produce the same output.
To view the status of the ports on a particular director in a cluster, you could use either
or
ll
By the way, if you haven’t figured it out yet, you can easily get the names of the engines
(or the directors) by simply running the ll command against the engines context or the
But what if you wanted to see the status of the ports across multiple directors? Now you
won’t want to use the cd command. You’ll want to use globbing with wildcards instead,
like this:
ll /engines/**/ports
While the single asterisk matches anything within a context, the double asterisk matches
across multiple contexts. So, in this case, it ends up matching multiple engines and
And if you wanted to see only some of the front-end ports on all directors:
ls /engines/**/hardware/ports/*1-FC0[0-3]
In some cases, you might need to set an attribute on an object within a context. For
example, you might need to enable a port by setting the enabled attribute on that port to
If you think about it, you could easily combine some globbing to enable multiple ports at
You can then verify the operation by using the -t parameter to the ls command, which
ls -t /engines/**/hardware/ports/A0-FC0[0-3]::enabled
There are many, many more examples I could share with you, but this should get you
started for now. I hope to have a post up soon with a CLI guide to setting up storage
As usual, feel free to speak up in the comments if you have any questions or