Scratch partition is not configured

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

The ESXi host could not find a scratch partition.

Example

A diskless host deployed via Auto Deploy does not have a scratch partition configured to store its log and VMkernel core dump files.

Impact

If a scratch partition is not configured, the host might not be able to dump cores when failures occur, might not be able to extract cores on reboot, or might stop system logging.

When host failures occur, if core dumps and system logs are not available, VMware Support will be unable to diagnose the failure.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5

Resolution

Either collect core dumps and logs remotely by configuring netdump service and remote syslog service respectively, or configure a scratch partition to collect coredump and log files.

For more information, see:

• Creating a persistent scratch location for ESXi 4.x and 5.x (1033696)
• ESXi Network Dump Collector in VMware vSphere 5.x/6.0 (1032051).