Diagnostic coredump partition is not activated after rebooting ESXi

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Diagnostic coredump partition is not activated after rebooting ESXi.
• The storage device is recognized correctly after completing reboot.
• In /var/log/syslog.log, you can see entries similar to:

YYYY-MM-DDTTT:TT:TTZ jumpstart: execution of 'system coredump partition set --enable=true --smart' failed in context dump-partition[start]': Unable to smart activate a dump partition. Error was: No suitable diagnostic partitions found..

 

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0

Cause

This is timing issue. If there is no suitable device during boot time due to slow device discovery, ESXi fail to activate coredump partition.
The slow device discovery is caused by many factors depend on each environment like hardware, driver, firmware.

Resolution

Currently there is no resolution.

VMware is aware of the issue and currently working to resolve in a future release.

To workaround this issue:

Add below command to local.sh,  See Modifying the rc.local or local.sh file in ESX/ESXi to execute commands while booting (2043564).

esxcli system coredump partition set --enable=true --smart