In a previous post, I mentioned I was doing a vSphere deployment sitting on some HP blades with SD cards installed. Because of this, I had to configure a few different parts of ESXi to point to network services rather than using local, persistent storage. This isn’t a bad thing in any case, as you really want your logs and core dumps to be off-host when you’re trying to troubleshoot host issues.
Network Dump Collector
It’s a good idea to have your core dumps going to a central location. you can do this with Network Dump Collector or via shared diagnostic storage. In this instance, I’ve provided an example on how to configure the host to use the Network Dump Collector, which can be installed from the vCenter installation media.
login as: root Using keyboard-interactive authentication. Password: The time and date of this login have been sent to the system logs. VMware offers supported, powerful system administration tools. Please see www.vmware.com/go/sysadmintools for details. The ESXi Shell can be disabled by an administrative user. See the vSphere Security documentation for more information. ~ # esxcli system coredump network get Enabled: false Host VNic: Network Server IP: Network Server Port: 0 ~ # esxcli system coredump network set --interface-name vmk0 --server-ipv4 192.168.0.100 --server-port 6500 ~ # esxcli system coredump network set --enable true ~ # esxcli system coredump network get Enabled: true Host VNic: vmk0 Network Server IP: 192.168.0.100 Network Server Port: 6500 ~ # esxcli system coredump network check Verified the configured netdump server is running ~ # /sbin/auto-backup.sh Files /etc/vmware/dvsdata.db and /tmp/auto-backup.1942245//etc/vmware/dvsdata.db differ Saving current state in /bootbank Clock updated. Time: 05:04:38 Date: 04/21/2015 UTC ~ #
It’s important to check that the Network Dump Collector service is running, too.
vSphere Syslog Server
You’ll also want to point your syslogs to a remote location. If you don’t have access to syslog in your environment, you can set it up from the vCenter installation media. Here’s an article on how to do that. Here’re the rough steps you need to take.
Check your current configuration first.
~ # esxcli system syslog config get Default Network Retry Timeout: 180 Local Log Output: /scratch/log Local Log Output Is Configured: false Local Log Output Is Persistent: false Local Logging Default Rotation Size: 1024 Local Logging Default Rotations: 8 Log To Unique Subdirectory: false Remote Host: <none>
Now you can set the configuration.
~ # esxcli system syslog config set --loghost='tcp://192.168.0.100:514'
Load the configuration.
~ # esxcli system syslog reload
Check that the configuration worked.
~ # esxcli system syslog config get
Backup the configuration.
~ # /sbin/auto-backup.sh
Persistent Scratch
I recommend setting a persistent scratch location as well. You can read about that here. In my case I used shared storage with directories for each host. I then set that as an option to configure via Host Profiles.
Okay, so hopefully that was useful for someone. More to follow …