1. Troubleshooting using ESXi Management Agents
So these management agents are important because Vcenter uses these to communicate with your ESXi host. So if you can’t connect your ESXi host through Vcenter, you may want to restart the management agents. So there’s a couple of different ways that you can go about this. The way that I’m going to do it is I’m going to connect to an ESXi host using Putty. So I’m going to launch Putty here in my hands on lab session. I’m just going to quickly modify the font size so it’s a little easier for everybody out there to see what I’m up to. And I’m going to go ahead and open a session to this ESXi host. Now this is one way to do it. In a minute, I’ll talk about how to do it locally.
So the fact that I’m connecting to this host remotely may not be possible. In certain situations, you may need to physically go up and access the console of the ESXi host. So anyways, I’m already logged in here and you can see I’m logged in as Root, so that’s good. I have to be logged in as Root and I’m in my ESXi shell. Now I’m logged in SSH root. So I am going to type in the following command etsy init Dhostdrestart, that’s my first command to restart host D, and the second management agent that I’m going to restart is called Vpxa. So I’m just going to slightly modify my command, but it’s a very similar command etsy nitdvpxa and then space restart. And I have successfully restarted the management agents on this ESXi host at that point.
And to make this whole process a little bit more comprehensive, I could just simply do the Services Shrestart command as well and put in that command. And you’ll notice that Services Shrestart, that’s going to restart all of the management agents on the ESXi host, and it’s going to take longer than simply restarting Vpxa and restarting host D. So that last command that I showed you, the Services Shrestar, if you need to, you can go into the DCUI of the ESXi host and you can access the shell. And here’s a nice little document on Esxsi. com showing you exactly how to get into the SSH shell from the DCUI. So basically, you hook up your keyboard and monitor to the ESXi host.
You have to enable the ESXi shell. So that’s always step one is to enable the ESXi shell, and once the ESXi shell is enabled, then from there you press Alt F one and that’ll bring you to the ESXi shell here. So once you’re in that ESXi shell, you can do Services Shrestart to restart all the management agents of that ESXi host, or you can also just simply restart hostee and Vpxa from there as well. I can also utilize commands like ESX Top and so on and so forth. So this is a nice little article showing you some of the things that you can do from the ESXi shell. And if you want to check this out, just go to esxsi. com and take a look at their troubleshooting with the ESXi shell document.
2. Demo – Working with vCenter 7 Logs
In this video I’ll demonstrate how to export system logs in the Vsphere client. So here I am logged into the Vsphere client and I’m going to hosts and Clusters and here is my Vcenter server appliance. I’m going to rightclick the Vcenter instance and I’m going to choose export system logs. And so from here I can pick which objects I want to export log logs for. I’m just going to focus on an individual ESXi host. And then do I want to also include the Vcenter server and the Vsphere User Interface Client logs so I can go ahead and pull those logs as well? And then I can specifically target which logs I want to see and which logs I don’t. And oftentimes you’ll be doing this at the request of VMware support. So you’ll just choose basically what they’re telling you to choose here. You can also export performance data as well. And then for core dumps, which have the contents ofmemory, you can put in the password for those encrypted core dumps if you’ve chosen to encrypt them.
So I’m going to go ahead and export these logs and it should start a download here where I can get these log files and download them to my computer. And from there, once I’ve successfully downloaded these log files, I’m just going to go back to the Vs Fair client here. And what we can do from the Vs Fair client is we can go to administration and we can actually upload those log files to a service request. So if we currently have a service request open with VMware support, we can upload our log files to that service request right here. So as you can see, it’s still working on generating this log file bundle for me. That process may take a little while, but once it’s done, I can just download the logs to my computer and upload them to a service request right inside of the Vsphere client.
3. Demo – Working with ESXi 7 logs
In this video I’ll show you how to work with the log files for an individual ESXi host. So here you can see I am in my Vsphere client and in my cluster I have a few different ESXi hosts and I can export my logs through this Vsphere client. But Vsphere client is only going to be available if Vcenter is up. So let’s assume that Vcenter is down and I need to export log files for this particular host. What I’ll do is I will launch the host client instead of using the Vsphere client because the V center is down, that means that the Vsphere client is down. So here in the host client I’ve clicked on Host at the left and I can just simply click on Actions and under Actions Generate Support bundle. So the only time you would probably ever really do this is if VMware support asks you to do so.
So here you can see the log bundle is being generated and this is going to take a few minutes for this log bundle to be completely created and ready to go. So yeah, so I’m going to have to wait for that process to finish. And so when this finishes, I’ll have this file available in my downloads folder and I’ll have that file that contains all of those log files available. And I’m just going to go ahead and click on that support bundle and open it up. And again, I’m using WinRAR to extract the contents of this file. And so let’s take a moment to explore what is actually included in these log files. You’ll notice that they are similar in format to the Vcenter logs if you’ve been looking at the V central log files as well. So in most cases you probably won’t be digging through these logs yourself. You’ll just ship them off to VMware support and let them analyze the contents of those log files.
