How to access guest's vmware.log on ESXi?

[jedijeff]

We are in the process of moving from Esx4.1 to Esxi 4.1. One of things we used to do under esx to troubleshoot various guest issues was to ssh into an Esx box and goto the filesystem the guest vm is on and and tail -f the vmware.log.

How can we accomplish the same thing on Esxi??

Thank you!

[lamw]

You can still do that exact same process, ESXi has Tech Support Mode which you can enable and browse the VMFS datastore to the path of the VM and it's vmware.logs.

You should not treat the Busybox / TSM console the same as classic ESX, but there is still a way to remotely login to the host to extract these logs. You can also do so using the vSphere Client and by browsing the datastore.

[a_p_]

This should work the same way.

André

[jedijeff]

I have always gotten errors when trying to download from vcenter, which I guess is the file lock the host has on the file--which is why we always ssh'd to the classic esx host and tailed directly from the datastore directory.

I will try to TSM--but that is certainly painful for me having to go through the remote kvm systems to get to the console....I didnt see anyway I could do it with VMA either unless I missed something.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

There are two modes of TSM - local and remote (SSH). With remote TSM you can connect with a SSH client and your experience will be similar to connecting via SSH to ESX.  But as noted,  TSM is not intended to provide a scripting environment for your ESXi hosts.  For that aspect see the vCLI or PowerCLI.

[iaco]

same problem here

on a powered-on machine, log file is locked:

# tail -f vmware.log

tail: vmware.log: Device or resource busy

tail: no files

i'm trying to vmotion that vm off an esxi that needs maintenance, but i get an "operation is not allowed in the current state" error.

i would like not to power that vm off, so i can't look at vmware.log file to troubleshoot the issue.

[vijaysn828]

Make sure you SSHing to the host where the VM is currently running. I have seen this issue when I connected to some other host and tried viewing vmware.log of the VM stored on Shared SAN.

[rickardnobel]

It is the same thing if wanting to view the VMX file while the VM is running, it is only accessable through the specific host running the guest.