Troubleshooting guide

Troubleshooting vSphere

This is for performance troubleshooting:

Official VMware course (3 days):

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And for documents

xtravirt published a HA troubleshooting whitepaper

Log File	Name	Details
/var/log/vmkernel	Vmkernel	Records activities related to the virtual machines and ESX host
/var/log/vmkwarning	Vmkernel Warnings	A copy of everything marked as a warning or higher severity from vmkernel log. Easier to look through than vmkernel log
/var/log/vmksummary	Vmkernel Summary	Used for avaialability and uptime statistics. Human-readable summary in vmksummary.txt
/var/log/vmware/hostd.log	Host Agent Log	Contains information on the agent that manages and configures the ESX host and its virtual machines
/var/log/vmware/vpx	VirtualCenter Agent	Contains information on the agent that communicates with VirtualCenter
/var/log/messages	Service Console	Log from the Linux kernel. Useful for underlying Linux issues. The kernel has no awareness of VMs running on the VMkernel
/var/log/vmware/esxcfg-boot.log	ESX Boot Log	ESX Boot log, logs all ESX boot events
/var/log/vmware/webAccess	Web Access	Records information on Web-based access to ESX Server
/var/log/secure	Authentication Log	Contains records of connections that require authentication, such as VMware daemons and actions initiated by the xinetd daemon
/var/log/vmware/esxcfg-firewall.log	ESX Firewall Log	Contains all firewall rule events
/var/log/vmware/aam	High Availability Log	Contains information related to the High Availability (HA) service
/var/log/vmware/esxupdate.log	ESX Update Log	Logs all updates completed using the esxupdate tool

NOTES:

Logs rotated by logrotate, see KB3402740. Rotated with a numeric extension, current log has no extension and the next newest one has a .1 extension.

Log is symbollically linked to the current real file. Run an 'ls -l logname.log' to see the link.

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http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1001596 - Troubleshooting VMware High Availability (HA)

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http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1004588 - Best practices for using and troubleshooting VMware Converter

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Use memtest86 to check if memory is fine.