A collegue of mine just gave a me a few tips on how to view the logfiles on an ESX Host in Real-time. Normally I would export all of the logs via the VIC or the vm-support command. But this limits me to only seeing what has happened, not what is currently happening.

Using the VMware Infrastructure Client, you can view some of the logs in real-time, but there is only a small amount of logs to choose from.

So how is it done? tail

• tail -f <logfile location/name>

This will display the logfile you wish to view in Real-time. You can also use;

• tail -n 100 <logfile location/name>

This would show the last 100 lines of the logfile. You can change the number accordingly.

• tail -F <logfile location/name>

This reloads the file when rotated.