How to capture a memory dump from a VMware virtual machine without stopping its execution. This is useful in cases where customers do not want to force a crash or change Windows dump parameters and reboot the machine. This procedure can be done without interrupting the execution of the machine.
vmss2core.exe -W8 snapshot.vmsn snapshot.vmem
vmss2core.exe -W snapshot.vmsn snapshot.vmem
vmss2core.exe -N snapshot.vmsn snapshot.vmem
(Note: vmsn may be vmss, and the vmem file may not be present or necessary.)
Successful output should be a "memory.dmp" (or "vmss.core" in case of Linux)
Techincal References
Converting a snapshot file to memory dump using the vmss2core tool (323788)
Identifying critical Guest OS failures within virtual machines (315245)