How to Check Uptime of VMware ESXi Host, vCenter and VM

Case: How to check vCenter Uptime?

VMware ESXi and VMware vCenter Server are 2 key components of vSphere virtualization suite. While ESXi is used to deploy and manage virtual machines, vCenter Server is a centralized platform for managing multiple ESXi hosts and VMs.

After created virtual machines on ESXi, you need to monitor them continuously to ensure that they are running properly, and to avoid errors and unexpected data loss.

Check uptime is a routine operation for monitoring and troubleshooting. If you are not familiar with it, reading this article will help you understand all the basics you need to know.

Why checking uptime important

Checking uptime is part of the vSphere environment state monitoring. VMware vSphere clusters are extremely good at handling failures in a very non-disruptive way. If a host crashes or goes down for some reason, vSphere HA kicks in and restarts the VM on a different host. You may not even notice it if you do not monitor the environment that notes the downtime of the VMs or the host.

Therefore, the general purposes for check uptime includes:

• Troubleshooting
• Diagnose stability issues
• Maintain a record of maintenance
• …

In addition, monitoring uptime can help catch if someone has rebooted a host or VM without the proper change control in place and proper signoffs, or if someone trying to do something unscrupulous in the environment, such as a rogue administrator installing a rogue VIB and rebooting a host.

That makes check uptime a good way to notice anything odd in the environment that may affect stability. If you want to check VM uptime for purposes like troubleshooting, how should you do that? How to check vCenter uptime or how to check VMware host uptime? This article summarizes the available ways for you.

How to check vCenter uptime via PowerCLI

Since vSphere 6.5, you can check vCenter uptime via the VCSA VAMI. VAMI is the new web-based management interface to perform basic administrative tasks for the appliance configuration. This interface allows to run some tasks via UI instead of using the command line interface.

To check vCenter uptime, you can use the PowerCLI function Get-VAMISummary, for example:

How to check VMware host uptime

Since it is a common requirement, there are multiple ways to check your VMware ESXi host uptime in a vSphere environment. For example, it is displayed in vSphere Client along with many other useful information about your ESXi host.

This part summarizes 3 available ways for checking VMware host uptime.

Way 1. How to check VMware host uptime in vSphere Client

Access and log in vSphere Client, the uptime information is displayed on the ESXi host Summary tab.

Way 2. How to check VMware host uptime via ESXi CLI

SSH to the host with root credentials. And run the command uptime to get the uptime of your ESXi host including days, hours, minutes, and seconds.

Way 3. How to check VMware host uptime via VMware PowerCLI

Checking VMware host uptime via VMware PowerCLI commands is perhaps the most powerful way. Using PowerCLI, you can not only check the uptime of a single host, but also check an entire environment if you want. The returned information can be exported to a CSV or manipulated in other ways.

To the get uptime in days, you can use the following:

Get-VMHost | Select Name,
  @{N="Uptime"; E={New-Timespan -Start $_.ExtensionData.Summary.Runtime.BootTime -End (Get-Date) | Select -ExpandProperty Days}}

To get the specific last boot time along with the uptime, you can use the following code snippet:

Get-Vmhost  | sort-object Name | Select-Object Name,
  @{N="Last Boot (UTC)";E={$_.ExtensionData.Summary.Runtime.BootTime}},
 
  @{N="Last Boot (Locale)";E={Convert-UTCtoLocal -UTCTime $_.ExtensionData.Sumary.Runtime.BootTime}},
 
  @{N="Uptime (Locale)";E={getTimeSpanFormatted((Get-Date) - (Convert-UTCtoLocal -UTCTime $_ExtensionData.Summary.Runtime.BootTime))}}

You can use the Export-CSV to export the results to a CSV file to pull into Excel or some other tool.

How to check VM uptime

Windows offers the Get-Uptime cmdlet to get the time elapsed since the last reboot of a server. The obvious advantage of this cmdlet is that you don’t have to calculate anything since it directly gives your server’s uptime as the output.

This cmdlet takes two parameters, namely:

Get-Uptime
[-Since]
[]

The [-Since] cmdlet returns a DateTime object to give you the server’s last restart date and time. If you use the cmdlet without any parameters, it only returns the uptime.

For example, if you run Get-Uptime, you will get the output like:

Get-Uptime
 
Days              : 9
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 9
Seconds           : 45
Milliseconds      : 0
Ticks             : 7781850000000
TotalDays         : 9.00677083333333
TotalHours        : 216.1625
TotalMinutes      : 12969.75
TotalSeconds      : 778185
TotalMilliseconds : 778185000

If you run Get-Uptime -Since, the output will be like:

Get-Uptime -Since
 
Tuesday, June 18, 2019 2:34:56 PM

Also, there’s a Get-VMUptime function. The simplest form to call the Get-VMUptime function would be like:

$vm = Get-VM MyVM
Get-VMUptime -VM $vm

This will return 1 object with the Uptime property showing the percentage.

VM data protection: batch backup VMs on vCenter Server

vCenter Server is a very convenient official platform for centrally managing ESXi virtual environments and large numbers of VMs on it. However, vCenter Server does not provide the feature of virtual machine backup. And that makes backup software a commonly accepted choice.

Here I introduce you to a VMware backup software AOMEI Cyber Backup, it enables you to backup multiple VMs either managed by vCenter Server, or on a standalone ESXi host.

✦ Agentless Backup: create complete and independent image-level backup for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V VMs.
✦ Flexible vSphere Backup: batch backup large numbers of VMs managed by vCenter Server, or multiple VMs on a standalone ESXi host.
✦ Multiple Storage Destinations: backup to local drive, or network destinations like Windows share or NAS.
✦ Automated Execution: create backup schedules to automate backups daily, weekly, monthly.

AOMEI Cyber Backup supports VMware ESXi 6.0 and later versions. Next, I will show you how to perform vSphere backup and restore via AOMEI Cyber Backup. You can click the following button to download the 30-day free trial.

*You can choose to install this VM backup software on either Windows or Linux system.

4 easy Steps to batch backup VMs on vCenter Server

1. Bind Devices: Access to AOMEI Cyber Backup web client, navigate to Source Device > VMware > + Add VMware Device to Add vCenter or Standalone ESXi host. And then click … > Bind Device.

2. Create Backup Task: Navigate to Backup Task > + Create New Task, and then set Task Name, Backup Type, Device, Target, and Schedule.

• Task Name: you can change the task name or use the default name with an ordinal.
• Device: batch select large numbers of VMs managed by vCenter Server for centralized backup.

• Target: select to back up to a local path, or to a network path.
• Schedule (optional): perform full, differential, or incremental backup, and automate execution according to the frequency you specified.

• Cleanup (optional): automatically delete the old backup copies that exceed the retention period you specified.

3. Run Backup: Click Start Backup and select Add the schedule and start backup now, or Add the schedule only.

Created backup tasks will be listed and monitored separately, for restoring, progress checking and schedule changing.

When restoring, you can also restore to new location to create a new VM in the same or another datastore/host directly from the backup, saving the trouble of re-configuring the new VM.

Summary

Checking uptime is one of the effective ways to monitor the state of your vSphere environment. It can help you troubleshoot errors, diagnose stability issues, or keep a record of maintenance. If you want to know how to check VMware host uptime, or check vCenter uptime, check VM uptime, this article summarized several available ways to do this.

Except for check uptime, backup and restore is also a reliable way to protect your VM data from disasters. You can try AOMEI Cyber Backup, a VMware backup software that enables you to create backup tasks cover multiple VMs, and automate the VM protection.