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fcameron
Contributor
Contributor

coredump and netdump

I'm curious about the coredump architecture in vCenter.  Presumably, if we have a vCenter appliance and it is on the host which crashes then we'll simply loose the coredump.  If we install the coredump utility on a Windows based vCenter then presumably we're singly dependent on that for both the syslog and coredump features (i.e. there's no redundancy in it).  None of this is critical, for us, however, I'm capturing the 'syslog' to a commodity unix servers redundantly and presumed I might do the same with the coredump.  However, it would seem that the netdump protocol has been largely abandoned by redhat (I think I had to go back to RHEL 4 to find it).

Does anyone know if the VMware implementation is based off the same?  Presumably it will then be in the open-source download for vCenter and could, in theory, be ported back to RHEL ... that's actually a question ... does anyone know if that is the case?  I'm going to download and dig tomorrow but curiosity just won't wait.  Right now I'm tempted to just capture the raw network data and dump it to files as I'm guessing it'll be pretty damn close to what's required, should I ever need it (which I don't expect I will).

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fcameron
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Contributor

OK.  So I downloaded the monstrous blobs which are the OSS code for 5.5, both vCenter and ESXi, and I can't find anything to do with 'netdump'.  I can't believe that we're talking about a clean implementation (especially when the protocol itself seems undocumented) so presume I'm just not looking in the right place.  Is anyone familiar with the structure of these components and where I might find the material.  Failing that, since the documents state that it's using the 'netdump' protocol, is anyone aware of any documentation relating to that (i.e. how are the keys distributed for authentication)?

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