Like most VI Admins, I've been using VMware ESXi quite a lot more lately and I'm slowly coming across things that are different to how they are in ESX. Log files being one of these differences.

With the absence of the Service Console, ESXi presents a slightly different architecture. If you haven't yet read The Architecture of VMware ESXi, I would recommend having a good read through.

Differences between ESX and ESXi logs

Here is the common log file structure in ESX (Source)

• /var/log/vmware/hostd.log – ESX Service Log
• var/log/vmware/vpx/vpxa.log – vSphere Client Agent Logs
• /var/log/vmware/aam – VMware HA Logs
• /var/logvmkernel – VMKernel Messages
• /var/log/vmkwarning – VMKernel Warnings
• /var/log/messages – Service Console Log

Here is the common log file structure in ESXi

• /var/log/vmware/hostd.log – ESXi Service Log
• var/log/vmware/vpx/vpxa.log – vCenter Agent Logs
• /var/log/messages – Syslog Log (Combines vmkernel & hostd)

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I really could have done with this information when i had An error occurred during configuration of the HA Agent on the host rather than having to trawl through loads of discussions on the VMware Communities.

There are now two really useful documents which can be found at the VIOPS website, one is called ESX 3 Server Log Map and the other is VirtualCentre 2 Logs. These documents contain all the information you need to know about VMware ESX 3.* and vCenter 2.* log files and their locations.

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