No diagnostic information is collected after an ESXi 5.x host fails with a purple diagnostic screen

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• After an ESXi 5.x host fails with a purple diagnostic screen, no diagnostic information is collected.
• The ESXi host reports the warning:
  
  No coredump target has been configured. Host core dumps cannot be saved.

Environment

• VMware vCenter Server 5.0.x
• VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x
• VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x
• VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
• VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
• VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1

Cause

This issue occurs when the core dump target is not configured and the VMkernel host core dumps cannot be saved.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, configure a coredump location for the ESXi host. For more information, see Configuring a diagnostic coredump partition on an ESXi 5.x host (2004299).

 

Note: Software iSCSI is not a supported connection type.

Additional Information

Configuring a diagnostic coredump partition on an ESXi 5.x/6.x host