ESXi local logs best practices

[netanelpe]

Hey all,
I have a few ESXi servers (7.0.3) which have the local datastore shared in vCenter.
I want to remove those local datastores as I have no use for them and sometimes people create VMs on the local datastore instead of the shared one.

I've tried to unmount one of the datastores and got an error on the corresponding ESXi that the logs location was on the local datastore.

How do I change those logs location? What is the best practice for those logs location? Should it be on the shared datastore?
Can I just prevent any use of those local datastores instead of unmounting?

Thanks!

[maksym007]

You are not able to remove local datastore. You can put him into Maintenance Mode if you want. 

Logs from ESXi, you can forward of course to Center but not all of them. 

[netanelpe]

Am I not able to just remove the local datastores from the datastore list?
Even if I will put them in maintenance mode I guess they will still show up when creating vm/migrate etc.

[maksym007]

Check the options Unmount\Remove Datastore. But I assume it will be not possible. 

What is the strong need to remove local datastore? 

[netanelpe]

There are many of them and confuse people in what datastore to create the VM in.

The unmount option is available but when you remove it you also get an error regarding the log location which is currently being saved on the local datastore. Can I move those logs' location? should it be on shared datastore?

[StephenMoll]

Isn't this where you need to change the persistent log settings?

In host, Configure > System > Advanced System Settings. 

Set the value of "Syslog.global.logDir" to the shared datastore and folder you want.

I.e. Change the default "[] /scratch/log" to something you want.

We use a shared datastore, where each host has a folder named with the hostname.

I.e. "[{Shared datastore name}] /logs/{hostname}"

Then maybe you'll be able to unmount the local datastore. I see no reason why this shouldn't be possible. All but one of our hosts are completely without local datastores.

[StephenMoll]

There is another setting that automatically places logs into a subdirectory of LogDir using hostname, so could set this to true.

Syslog.global.logDirUnique = true

Syslog.global.logDir = [{datastore name}] /logs

[maksym007]

Create a Datastore folder for local ESXi Datastores and put them all there.