vMA vi-logger why was it removed?

[logiboy123]

Does anyone out there know the reason why VMware removed the vi-logger functionality out of the vMA appliance in vSphere 5?

I can understand adding an easy to use facility on vCenter as this is a great solution for SMB, but for large corporate's I wouldn't use it as it adds an unnecessary level of complexity for the vCenter server. Think upgrading or reinstalling vCenter servers in a linked mode environment with hundreds of hosts. Needing to add and setup that functionality for logging adds a extra couple of hours to a change that I would really rather not have to do.

Also many of the corp or Gov environments I work in have syslog setups, but setting it up requires communicating and liaising with other teams who are often not helpful or co-operative. Having a dedicated syslog system for VMware Admins makes life so much easier but as above I don't want it on my vCenter server and I don't want to pay for another Windows license just to get the seperation I'm looking for.

I've seen the the virtuallyGhetto post about re-enabling vi-logger in vMA 5.0 which is great and I'll probably do a blog at some point similar to my end-to-end walkthrough for setting up a vMA 4.1 syslog server. But I would really like to know the logic behind disabling vi-logger in vMA 5.0. Also if people start re-enabling this functionality in vMA 5.0 does that mean VMware will break future releases so that you can't? That would be crazy annoying.

Cheers,

Paul

[lamw]

Hi logiboy123,

I can't speak to why vi-logger was removed, but I can only assume that users wanted that functionality to be avaiable with vCenter Server and with vSphere 5.0, there is Syslog Collector component that is available both on Windows and Linux (bundled with VCSA). For small environments, this works perfectly and for larger environments, you'll generally want to seperate out your logging infrastructure and you may even want to setup an additional syslog server for redudnancy, since ESXi supports more than one syslog server. Syslog server is nothing new and is pretty trivial to setup (but ensure you properly maintain the system e.g. ensure disk does not get filled up our purge old logs) and most organizations already have existing infrastructure that vSphere admins usually directly leverage.

The article that you reference is NOT re-enablign vi-logger on vMA 5, it's demonstrating how you can setup your own syslog server on vMA 5 using syslog-ng which is what Syslog Collector is based off of which is included in VCSA or Windows installer.

If you're looking for a quick solution, you can always download the VCSA and not enable vCenter Server and just syslog collector and you'll get the same functionality. I definitely get your point that it's nice to not have to set anything up, but this to me IMHO is general "infrastructure" services, it's nothing specific to virtualization/VMware and you have several options of setting up syslog server.

[logiboy123]

I get your point. I could easily go off find a distro of linux, get a syslog server etc. But VMware vMA was so easy to use and setup it annoys me that I now need to go off and create an alternate solution. The upside is that it gives me a blog article opportunity.

Regards,

Paul

[lamw]

vMA 5 comes with a default syslog server (syslog-ng), you just need to make a few tweaks to get it working so you can start forwarding logs from an ESXi host which is the article you referenced