copy vm-support log bundle from ESXi host

[critical3rr0r]

Can someone suggest a way for me to pull the vm-support bundle from an ESXi host 4.0 Update 3? We do not enable SSH on our hosts so SCP and Veeam FastSCP are out. I have tried several commands from PowerCLI remote CLI and vMA and nothing seems to work. Any suggestions?

We create the bundle in unsupported mode and it seems to store the .tgz file under /var/usr but I can not see the file when I browse to the directory from vMA. I suppose it is because a different user (root) is creating the bundle and I am logged into vMA with vi-admin.

When I run the vifs.pl command: vifs <connection_options> -g  "[StorageName] VM/VM.txt"
    -Z "ha-datacenter" "tmp/backup/VM.txt"

from RCLI the file can not be located

When I run:

Get-Host HostNameOrIP | Get-Log -Bundle -DestinationPath c:\Storage\Location\

with Powercli I get the following error:

Get-Host : A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument '**.**
.**.**'.
At line:1 char:9
+ Get-Host <<<<  **.**.**.** | Get-Log -Bundle -Destination c:\
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidArgument: (:) [Get-Host], ParameterBindin
   gException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : PositionalParameterNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell
   .Commands.GetHostCommand

(I replaced the IP address with * for privacy reasons)

Is enabling SSH truly my ONLY option?

[Yik Meng Wong]

Does your partition that you are trying to pull the log bundle have enough free space? Sometimes, the file size for that could be huge. To check free space on Service Console, use "vdf -h", the v includes VMFS, while "df -h" excludes VMFS.

So you might want to change the location where you dump those files.

You may also want to manually run vm-support -w /vmfs/volume/guid. Where guid is the guid a volume with plenty free space.

/etc/opt/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg will actually show you where your logs are generated by default and how many file you have. Try moving/ backing up the files in /usr/lib/vmware/hostd/docroot/downloads. This contains all the old log bundle files. This should free up space to run the vm-support command.

And yes, you can try enabling SSH to see if this helps as well.

Hope this helps.

Clement

[critical3rr0r]

Thanks Clement.

The answer was much easier than I expected. Because we have no shared storage on these hosts it was simply a matter of copying the files to the local datastore and then using the VI client to download the file to my local workstation using the following command from unsupported mode:

ls -la /vmfs/volumes

cd /var/tmp (where the log bundle was created by deafult)

mv <filename> /vmfs/volumes/"name of the local datastore"

As I usual I was trying to techify the answer which was actually very simple.