Gathering logs in VMware Data Services Manager v1.5

The ability to gather logs is an essential part of troubleshooting any product. Logs can help you to resolve issues on your own, but may also be necessary should you need to engage with a technical support organizations. In this post, we will look at the various log bundles which can be gathered from a VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) deployment. We will see the different logs associated with the different layers of VMware DSM. We will also examine which roles have permissions to gather the various log bundles. Roles in VMware DSM Let’s begin with a review of the…

Gathering core dump files when encryption is enabled

One of the key new features of vSphere 6.5 is vSphere VM Encryption, a mechanism to encrypt all virtual machine files. This mechanism not only encrypts the VMDK, but also the metadata files and core dumps associated with a VM. Now, there would not be much point in sending an encrypted core dump file to VMware for analysis, so a mechanism has been put in place to allow these files to be recrypted using a password before sending them to VMware. The password can then be shared with VMware to allow us to examine the core dumps.  This is how…

A new vRealize Log Insight Content Pack for VSAN

Attention VSAN users. A new Log Insight content pack has just been released specifically for Virtual SAN. For those of you not familiar with Log Insight, this product does automated log management through log analytics, aggregation and search. It allows administrators to analyze terabytes of logs, perform smart parsing to discover structure in unstructured data, and enable interactive, real-time search and analytics through a GUI-based, easy to use interface.

Virtual Volumes (VVols) – Syslog and Scratch Usage

I had a very interesting query in my recent VVol post on vSphere HA interop. In that post I showed how the VVol datastore could be used for datastore heartbeating. The question then arose when the VVol datastore could be used for other things, such as a syslog and scratch destination. I couldn’t see any reason why not, but just to be sure, I tested it out in the lab. The quick answer is yes, you can use a Config-VVol for syslog, and no, you cannot use a Config-VVol for scratch. If you want to see the steps involved, and…

VSAN considerations when booting from USB/SD

This is a conversation that comes up time and time again. It’s really got to do with the following considerations when booting an ESXi host that is participating in VSAN from an SD/USB device:: What should I do for persisting the vmkernel logs? What should I do about persisting the VSAN trace files? What should I do for capturing core dumps (PSOD)?