[minipost] Capturing bidirectional traffic of virtual machine (VMs) on vmWare ESX 6.x
Here I was getting a trouble with communication between an ESX virtual machine and the nearby switch (Nuage/DCN controller VM talking with a VTEP switch if someone is interested) and because that switch was direct destination of the control plane packets (OVSDB over TCP) I was not having much success creating a mirroring interface on the switch. So I learned how to capture a specific virtual machine traffic directly on the ESXi host’s SSH console and to not forget that, I will document this here.
Step 1 – enable SSH to the ESX host
In most cases this is not running by default, so go to the ESXi server direct terminal or iLo and via “F2″enter system customization and enter troubleshooting section:
Right behind this menu should be “SSH Enable” option, and you simply hit that with enter
ALTERNATIVE: If you have vCenter deployed, you can use its GUI to enable SSH on a specific host like this:
Step 2 – locating switchport ID
My virtual machine was called “DCN4.0R5_VSC1” and was simply connected to logical vswitch0 in Continue reading