I’ve had occasion, over the last 24 hours, to change the logging level of my vCenter server. It’s been a little more crashy than usual, and I’ve discovered that a number of KB articles are not updated for vSphere 4.0 Update 2 or Windows Server 2008.
If you want to change the log retention policies, you can follow most of the instructions in KB 1004795 but there are two things I think you should know if you’re running on Windows 2008:
1. Your vpxd.cfg file and your logs are actually in:
C:ProgramDataVMwareVMware VirtualCenter
2. The XML stanza for the logging is commented out in 4.0 Update 2, so remove the <!– and –> lines to make it work. For example, make:
...
<logName>CpuFeatures</logName>
</level>
<!--
<log>
<maxFileNum>10</maxFileNum>
<compressOnRoll>false</compressOnRoll>
<level>info</level>
</log>
-->
<vpxd>
<das>
...
into:
...
<logName>CpuFeatures</logName>
</level>
<log>
<maxFileNum>100</maxFileNum>
<compressOnRoll>true</compressOnRoll>
<level>info</level>
</log>
<vpxd>
<das>
...
You may also want to change the compressOnRoll to ‘true’ as I did above if you are concerned about disk space usage.
This may seem obvious to a lot of people, but for those that only occasionally make changes to vpxd.cfg it helps to have been pre-warned about the differences. At least you’ll vaguely remember that something’s changed… 🙂