As an Escalation Engineer, part of my daily work is reviewing log files of various systems and vendors. In my first blog post, I would like to show which VMware ESXi 5 log files are most relevant for troubleshooting storage and networking related problems.

All current ESXi 5 logs are located under /var/log and as they rotate, they’ll be available under /scratch/logs

 

/var/log/vmkernel.log:

• VMkernel related activities, such as:
  • Rescan and unmount of storage devices and datastores
  • Discovery of new storage like iSCSI and FCP LUNs
  • Networking (vmnic and vmks connectivity)

/var/log/vmkwarning.log:

• Extracted warning and alert messages from the vmkernel.log

/var/log/hostd.log::

• Logs related to the host management service
• SDK connections
• vCenter tasks and events
• Connectivity to vpxa service, which is the vCenter agent on the ESXi server

/var/log/vobd.log:

• VMkernel observations
• Useful for network and performance issues

Also, if you have a VM which is affected in particular, it might be worth looking into the vmware.log which is stored with the Virtual Machine. You can find the log under /vmfs/volumes/datastore_name/VM_name/vmware.log.

For the location of ESXi 3.5 and 4.x log files, can be found here.