ESXi host stops saving logs to storage

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

The ESXi host stops saving log to local storage for various reasons:

• The local storage is out of space.
• There is a network or SAN failure or interruption for remote storage locations.
• The log file is corrupt.
• There is a disk failure.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0

Resolution

To resolve this issue, perform one of the following workarounds:

• Use the following command to inspect the "Log Output" field to find where the directory logs are stored.

# esxcli system syslog config get

• Test the connectivity if the location is a remote datastore (NFS or SAN).

• Use the following command to determine the amount of free datastore disk space.

# esxcli storage filesystem list

• Inspect the file /var/log/.vmsyslogd.err for low-level debugging information.

After you identify the cause of the problem, use the following command to reload the syslog server and enable disk logging to continue.

 

# esxcli system syslog reload

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: You can configure the rotation and size parameters at a global and individual log-file level with commands located in the file esxcli system syslog. If you run out of disk space for logs frequently, consider changing the rotation and size parameters to reduce the amount of disk space consumed by logs.