List of Cellcli Commands :

The help command above showed all the commands available via cellcli. Note the following:

• Login as root only to perform calibrate commands and do the initial configuration. You can launch cellcli as the root user on any the cell server nodes, but as a matter of practice (and security) it’s best to get used to working with “celladmin” or “cellmonitor”
• While connected to cellcli as the Linux account celladmin, you can perform all cellcli commands except calibrate.
• While logged into the cell server as cellmonitor, you can do any “read-only” commands; you cannot change any configuration or attributes. The cellmonitor Linux login should be used for monitoring purposes and can be secured by providing a Linux password that could be distributed to a wider-range class of user than employees that require administrative capabilities.

Using dcli

The cellcli commands in the previous section operate on the Cell server you’re logged in to. To obtain a cross-cell view of cell server configuration, metrics, alerts, and other information, you can use dcli (Distributed Command Line Interface). dcli is a Python script installed on each Exadata node that allows you to run Cell CLI commands on multiple cell server nodes at once.

In order or dcli to function, SSH user equivalency should be established to eliminate the need to supply the “celladmin” (or root/cellmonitor) Linux password on the cell servers. Before showing the output of a dcli monitoring command, let’s walk through how to setup SSH equivalency. I’ll start by “unkeying” SSH trust – this basically removed authorized_keys entries from the celladmin’s ~/.ssh directory on each cell server.

Now, we’ll re-establish SSH equivalency:

Next, ensure that the ~/.ssh directory has 700 permissions for the celladmin Linux user on each cell server. Here’s a sample cell listing using dcli:¹ In this example, the “-g cell_group” clause tells dcli to read the “cell_group” file for a list of cell servers to operate on. The contents of cell_group are provided after the actual dcli command below, with one cell server name for each row: 

Now to monitor, for example, the amount of FlashCache used in each cell:

If you were only interested in cell servers exa1cel02 and exa1cel03, use the “-c” option as below: 

You could also use the “-l” option on dcli to provide a non-default (celladmin) login to each cell server; for example, “-l root” or “-l cellmonitor”