Are you looking for VMs where "Enable logging" is off?
Or for VMs where "Enable logging" is on, but no vmware.log files are created?

Hi,

I am not sure about powercli, I may follow this in case I want to find this information

1. Login to ESXi host which has all the datastores mapped

2. Use general linux  "find" command to find the vmware.log file on all datastores

3. This will give you list of all vmware.log file from all folders may be lengthy one depends on number of VMs

4. copy the data to a file

5. Read the file and use cut command to get the fourth column i.e /vmfs/volumes/<DS name>/<vm folder>/vmware.log , fourth column is the VM name.

6. Compare this list with your VM inventory list exported from vCenter or some other tool, whichever VM is missing, then that VM does not have the log file.

Note: This output may not be very accurate if your VM name and VM folder name is different. However, it may help you to some extent.

I have noticed that some virtual machines does not contain vmware.log files. I need to find the root cause of it.

There's been an issue with growing log files (up to several GB), especially for Windows Terminal-Servers. This often caused disk space issues on the datastores.

Maybe this happened in the past, and someone disabled logging for such VMs (VM settings -> Options -> General).

You can use the following command to list the VMs with their current setting.

Get-VM |  %{$M = Get-View $_ ;  Write-Host $M.Name " - " $M.Config.Flags.EnableLogging}

André

Hello LucD!

The environment contain thousands VMs. First of all, I need to find those VMs, where "Enable Logging" is ON, but vmware.log files does not exist for some reasons (this is a problem). After that, starting investigating the root cause of such strange behavior.

To enable logging for VMs via Power CLI we can use your article: http://www.lucd.info/2011/02/27/virtual-machine-logging/

Hello Sureshkumar M!

Thank you for your answer. It should be an option. My concerns was similar, but I thought to use PowerCLI. Idea was to list all VMs, which does not vmware.log files in their folders in all datastores. List all VMs, and then, look for a different. The problem is I am not really good at PowerCLI, and I need somebody provide me an appropriate command.

Anyway, thank you.

Can you check if the following already lists the problematic VMs, at least for the powered on VMs.

You should check those where the LogFiles column shows 0.

This would avoid having to do an actual dir of the VM's folder.

Hello André!

Thank you so much for your help! It is useful. How to export this list to csv file?

P.S.

Can you recommend me a book or so for the good PowerCLI start ? Thank you in advance.

LucD, I have run this script and check the result. LogFiles = "0" only for part of powered OFF virtual machines. All powered ON virtual machines have status different from "0", such as 6,7,4,1,5,3..

André, you command helped me to define that some VMs were really not have enabled logging option. Thank you once again. This partially helped.