Management - DCUI

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Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) — the low-level configuration and management interface, accessible through the console of the server, used primarily for initial configuration and troubleshooting.

VMware ESXi consists of the following: VMkernel (the underlying operating system), management applications, agents and virtual machines. The VMkernel has control of all hardware devices and manages resources for the applications.

The applications that run on top of VMkernel include: Direct Console User Interface (DCUI), Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM), various agents and Common Information Model (CIM) system.

The DCUI is displayed only on the console of an ESXi system. It provides a BIOS-like, menu-driven interface for interacting with the system. One of the system users defined in VMkernel is dcui, which is used by the DCUI process to identify itself when communicating with other system components.
The DCUI configuration tasks include:

Set administrative password
Configure networking, if not done automatically with DHCP

Troubleshooting tasks include:

Perform simple network tests
View logs
Restart agents
Restore defaults

The intention is that the user carries out minimum configuration with the DCUI, then uses a remote management tool, such as the VI Client, VirtualCenter, or the remote command line interfaces, to perform all other configuration and ongoing management tasks. The initial root password to the DCUI is blank.

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