Commands

To discover the available commands, type commands for a detailed list, or use tab-completion (press the keyboard TAB key twice) for a brief list of commands and objects.

Commands fall into three main groups:

All of the Control API methods are accessible via the CLI. The corresponding command is constructed from the class name and method name as listed in the Virtual Traffic Manager: Control API Guide; refer to this document for details about each command.

For example, to list all of the virtual servers:

Arguments for commands are given as space separated names; commas between arguments are optional. Argument values that contain a space or other special characters that may confuse the syntax should be "quoted". Lists are contained within square brackets ([ ]).

For example, Virtual Traffic Manager: Control API Guide details the method “getNodes” in the Pool class as follows:

Get the lists of nodes for each of the named pools.

The corresponding CLI command would be Pool.getNodes. The documentation shows that the command takes an array of pool names (String[] names); the command line to call this method on two pools would be:

The output from Pool.getNodes is declared as String[][], in other words, an array of arrays. For each pool that was specified, an array of nodes is returned.

For convenience, in its interactive mode, the CLI indexes the output of the command to show the list of nodes prefixed by the pool name that they refer to.

Many commands in the Control API take a list of arguments so that they can operate on more than one object at once. To simplify the use of commands with a single item, the array can be omitted:

The * symbol is a wildcard that can be used to match multiple objects:

Partial names can also be wildcarded. For example, to enable keep-alives on all the pools with a name beginning "Pool":

Some commands require more complicated argument structures. For instance, VirtualServer.addVirtualServer is defined in Virtual Traffic Manager: Control API Guide as:

The BasicInfo structure is defined as:

Structures are supplied to the CLI by using “{“ and “}” curly brackets, identifying each member with key:value pairs. For example,

To obtain help with the expected arguments for any command, use the help available through the CLI:

You can store and retrieve arbitrary name:value configuration pairs in the Virtual Traffic Manager configuration system using the CLI. This configuration is replicated across your cluster, and is only accessible through the REST API, SOAP API, and CLI.

You can find a full list of commands associated with storing and retrieving custom configuration by typing help Custom at the prompt.

To store a custom configuration, use the Custom.setStringsLists command. The following example sets a name:value pair under the list named "counters":

You can add multiple name:value config pairs to the list by appending additional {"name":<name>, "value":<value>} items as desired.

To retrieve the "counters" configuration, use the following command:

Using this system, you can organize your custom configuration into logical groups, initially by creating a new list, and within this, by each name:value pair. Each value can itself be a single item or a list of items.

The CLI includes a number of additional commands that simplify viewing and modifying configuration. Full help and usage instructions can be found using help <commandname>.