ESXi on USB and retaining logs across reboots

[jwall04]

I have some ESXi 4.1 update nothing hosts for which I followed the instructions here VMware KB: Creating a persistent scratch location for ESXi 4.x and 5.x to configure a scratch partition so logs are retained across reboots.  I could see 9 messages.gz files in the log directory, there were a few dated last month, I rebooted the host and then there are still 9 .gz files but all with todays date.  Also now when I look at the Events tab on the vSphere client on this host there are no events before the reboot.

Does this make sense, shouldn't they events be retained now that I have a scratch partition?

[admin]

Hi ,

when you configure the scratch partition to a persistent all your doing is moving the logs location from RAM disk to a more Non-volatile disk, because we do not want to lose the logs after a reboot.

But it does not change the way how the logs are rolled over. there is a per-defined value for logs after which it gets rolled over, so that your storage does not get filled up only with log files.

If you wanna save all your logs  change the log rotation options.

VMware KB: Controlling the size and number of vmkernel logs in ESX hosts

VMware vSphere 4 ESXi Installable and vCenter Server Documentation Center

Thanks,

Avinash

[jwall04]

Thanks for the info Avinash.  Do I need to make the change on the host, your first link, as well as each vm, second link?