Log Bundles, of the Virtual Center Variety

Things break. They always do. Chaos is inevitable. So how do you get insight into some of the chaos that was occurring in your Virtual Center when disaster strikes? Turns out, the VI Client makes this quite easy.

After you get your Virtual Center service running again, connect using the VI Client. Once connected… well follow along:

File > Export > Export Diag Data

The resulting window:

The options you select here determine the logs you get… Be careful when doing this across your entire VI, as it may take quite some time. For our example, we’ll stick with just the Virtual Center logs. After that, select a path and hit OK! This generates a task, much like the following:

What this task does, is give you the time to go get a cup of coffee. Really (Remember the note above? Now imagine we did this across 200 hosts).  Done:

This task generates a folder in the location you specified prior. The contents of the folder file look very much like:

PS C:Documents and Settingscody.bunchDesktopVMware-VirtualCenter-support-2009-01-25@19-07-49> dir

Directory: C:Documents and Settingscody.bunchDesktopVMware-VirtualCenter-support-2009-01-25@19-07-49

Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
—-                ————-     —— —-
d—-         1/25/2009   7:07 PM            viclient-support
-a—         1/25/2009   7:09 PM   76580475 vcsupport-2009-01-25@19-07-49.zip

Contained within the sub folder are logs related to the VI Client. They look like:

PS C:Documents and Settingscody.bunchDesktopVMware-VirtualCenter-support-2009-01-25@19-07-49viclient-support> dir

Directory: C:Documents and Settingscody.bunchDesktopVMware-VirtualCenter-support-2009-01-25@19-07-49viclient-s
upport

Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
—-                ————-     —— —-
-a—         1/12/2009   9:15 PM      73010 viclient-0.log
-a—         1/18/2009   9:50 AM      43329 viclient-1.log
-a—         1/18/2009  10:49 AM     295807 viclient-2.log
-a—         1/18/2009  12:22 PM      63804 viclient-3.log
-a—         1/18/2009   9:29 PM      46094 viclient-4.log
-a—         1/19/2009   8:28 AM     106489 viclient-5.log
-a—         1/20/2009   1:30 PM      63542 viclient-6.log
-a—         1/20/2009   4:03 PM        133 viclient-7.log
-a—         1/25/2009   7:07 PM     142524 viclient-8.log
-a—          1/9/2009   8:17 PM     169476 viclient-9.log
-a—         1/25/2009   1:43 PM        235 viclient-index.xml

Cool. Good to know but for the moment we’re after the Virtual Center logs, hidden in that zip file. Go ahead and extract that out, it’ll give you something like this:

PS C:Documents and Settingscody.bunchDesktopVMware-VirtualCenter-support-2009-01-25@19-07-49vcsupport-1-25-2009-19-
4> dir

Directory: C:Documents and Settingscody.bunchDesktopVMware-VirtualCenter-support-2009-01-25@19-07-49vcsupport-
1-25-2009-19-4

Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
—-                ————-     —— —-
d—-         1/25/2009   7:09 PM            Config
d—-         1/25/2009   7:09 PM            DrmDumps
d—-         1/25/2009   7:08 PM            Logs
-a—         1/25/2009   7:09 PM       4003 tree-vc-support.txt
-a—         1/25/2009   7:04 PM         12 vc-support-ver.txt
-a—         1/25/2009   7:09 PM       9656 vc-support.log

Config, DMP Dumps, and Logs. Looks like we’ve found the meat of this search. In the log’s folder you’ll find a *.csv and *.evt of the event logs on the system at the time this dump as taken. More importantly tho, you’ll also find the vpxd folder… these are the logs we’re after!

PS C:Documents and Settingscody.bunchDesktopVMware-VirtualCenter-support-2009-01-25@19-07-49vcsupport-1-25-2009-19-
4Logsvpxd> dir

Directory: C:Documents and Settingscody.bunchDesktopVMware-VirtualCenter-support-2009-01-25@19-07-49vcsupport-
1-25-2009-19-4Logsvpxd

Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
—-                ————-     —— —-
-a—         1/25/2009   7:04 PM    9437340 profiler-0.log
-a—         1/25/2009   6:05 AM  209715224 profiler-1.log
-a—         1/24/2009  11:40 AM  209715224 scoreboard-0.log
-a—         1/25/2009   7:05 PM   26585551 scoreboard-1.log
-a—         1/23/2009   7:33 AM    5242904 vpxd-0.log
-a—         1/25/2009   7:05 AM    5242904 vpxd-1.log
-a—         1/25/2009   7:04 PM    1719036 vpxd-2.log
-a—          1/9/2009   3:44 PM    5242904 vpxd-3.log
-a—         1/11/2009   1:50 PM    5242904 vpxd-4.log
-a—         1/13/2009  12:22 PM    5242904 vpxd-5.log
-a—         1/15/2009  12:35 PM    5242904 vpxd-6.log
-a—         1/17/2009  12:41 PM    5242904 vpxd-7.log
-a—         1/19/2009   8:48 AM    5242904 vpxd-8.log
-a—         1/21/2009   7:51 AM    5242904 vpxd-9.log

On these I believe they count from 0 to 9, 9 being the oldest, 0 being the most recent, but the dates on these files seem to disagree with me…

These logs, can also be grabbed using the VI Toolkit for windows like this:

PS C:> get-log –bundle

That’s it! Next time we’ll go over reading these a bit.