Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

log

Changing the directory of your vSphere vCenter log files

· ·

Something that a lot of people haven’t looked in to or just don’t think about is relocating the log files of vCenter, I wrote a short article 2 years ago and thought it was time to reiterate it. By default (Windows 2003) log files are stored in “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs”, and for Windows 2008 log files are stored in “C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs”.

As you can imagine the C:\ partition is not the ideal place for storing log files. I would personally recommend to use a separate drive for logfiles so avoid it from flooding any OS or Program related drives. You could pick a small size based on the expected log size and if needed increase the amount of logs that are stored and the size of the log file.

Changing this is pretty simple. Open “vpxd.cfg” and add the following line in between <log> and </log>

<directory>D:\VMware\Logs</directory>

Changing the amount of log files stored and the size is also pretty basic, in this example vCenter will store 10 logfiles which are max 10MB each:

<maxFileSize>10485760</maxFileSize>
<maxFileNum>10</maxFileNum>

Keep in mind that you will need to restart the vCenter Service after these changes before they take effect!

VM’s vmware.log rotation options

· ·

Yesterday I posted about the article on the hostd, vpxa and vpxd log file options. Today another KB article has been released to setup a rotation scheme for the VM’s log file: vmware.log. Might be worth checking it out and setting it up. You need to change the VM’s vmx file for this to work though. In short:

logging = true or false
log.rotateSize = maximum size in bytes the file can grow to: 10000
log.keepOld = rotation level, amount of log files to keep: 10
log.fileName = change name and path of log file

Rotating Hostd, VPXD and VPXA log files

· ·

If your hostd, vpxd and or vpxa log files are rotating to quickly or not quick enough check out this great KB article on how to set this up. The most important thing to set is the maximum amount of logfiles and the size. Be sure to do a basic calculation so your logging partition won’t fill up completely! And while your at it, might be worth setting up the rotation scheme for vmkernel, messages etc. If I can find the time I will do a blog article on that one later this week.

VirtualCenter log files in your temp directory

· ·

By default your VirtualCenter logfiles are stored in a temp folder(as of 2.5 they are stored in: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs). VMware Wolf wrote a nice article about all the locations these log files are stuffed. For some reason I don’t get a pleasant feeling when I store my VirtualCenter (VPXD) log files in a temporary windows directory or the profile directory for that matter(thanks for the comment!!). If there’s one thing admin’s clean up first when they tend to run out of diskspace it’s their temp directory… it’s called temp for a good reason!

So in order to prevent this you could change the location of the VPXD log files very easily. Edit “vpxd.cfg”. It’s located here: %AllUsersProfile%\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\.

Add the following lines in the “<config>” section and change the path accordingly:

<log>
<directory>c:\VC_Logs</directory>
</log>