Downloading log files for an individual VM

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

It is sometimes useful to manually download individual VM log files for circumstances such as analyzing events that occurred on an ESXi host that the VM used to be running on, but has since migrated away from, or for per-VM troubleshooting.

Resolution

To download the log files for a VM:

1. Select the VM in vSphere Client, then navigate to the Datastores tab.
2. Click on the datastore where the VM files are located to go to the datastore browser, then navigate to the VM directory. If the VM has more than one datastore, you may need to look through them to find the correct one.
3. Select all of the vmware.log files as seen in the example below, then click "Download":
   
4. The file download will open a new tab, and a zip archive of the selected log files will be downloaded. If the file fails to download, ensure that popups are enabled for the vSphere Client page in your browser.