ESXi 3.5 host halted last night

[withanh]

One of my ESXi hosts halted last night and I need some help finding logs to try and figure out what happened. We do not have any enterprise tools (i.e. no vCenter, etc.).

When I say halted, I mean that all servers that were running on that host were effectively non-existent, not responding to remote control or pings. When I tried to connect via VI Client, it said the client was not available. When I looked at the console of the server the screen was blank except for a cursor flashing in the upper left corner of the screen.

I know this happened at 10pm last night because I have other tools monitoring the servers that told me they went offline.

But in my VI Client, when I click on the top line (shows machine name) then the Events tab, it only shows since I rebooted it this morning. Then I click on the Administration button and see the System Logs and it appears to show from today at 14:54 (is this UTC? I ask because it's only 8:33am!) to today at 15:22. If these times are UTC, I am in Pacific time so right now we are -7 due to Daylight Saving Time, so 14:54 is 7:54am which is the time I power cycled the machine.

Is there any where else I can find logs?

Thanks!

 

[TechyMcSe2k]

Can you even get to the main ESXi page at the console? I know you can access logs there through the GUI. Have you tried a repair on the ESXi installation?

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[TechyMcSe2k]

From the console of ESXi you can , hit Alt-F1, then type unsupported to get to the command shell. The try and locate the /var/logs directory



_______________________________________
Great knowledge can be obtained by mastering the Google algorithm.

 

[withanh]

I did not do a repair, I just power cycled the box and it came back up and the guests all started like they're supposed to.

I can get to the console now that it's been rebooted. I'll try looking where you suggest, but aren't those the same logs I was looking at through the VI client? That says the log is /var/log/vmware/hostd.log. Is there another I should look at?

Thanks!

 

[TechyMcSe2k]

On the console, there is an option to look at logs without going in to the command shell


_______________________________________
Great knowledge can be obtained by mastering the Google algorithm.

 

[withanh]

Great, thanks! I'll look there.

h