Hello. My name is Ted. I'm a senior engineer at Dell EMC with the Systems Management Group. In this video I'm going to be talking to you about log collection for OMIVV. In a previous video we talked about generating the troubleshooting bundle for log collection.
In this video I'm going to show you what other logs we can look at, and review a live log as it's in progress. For this I've connected to our vCenter directly. The plugin logs are located here in /var/log/vmware/vsphere-ui/logs in the vsphere_client_virgo log. This log here is important for reviewing what actions are happening when a plugin is registered to vCenter.
Let's go ahead and grab this log right here and I'll show you what that kind of looks like. So here we have the client_virgo log, and open this up in notepad++. Starting at the end of the log we can see what happens, here we can see the connection to the vsphere.local. If you are troubleshooting a connection with vCenter and the plug-in is not loading or the plug-in is unavailable this is the log that you're going to want to look in to review that.
The next thing we're going to look at is in vCenter. We're going to do a host deployment. I have a couple of PuTTY sessions hooked up here. What we're doing is we're tailing the spectre vCenter app log. I have enabled root on the OMIVV appliance and I'm going to be running this tail command on that log, it is in the slash temp directory. I've also set up a tail command here with egrep to look at the various different strings that are used in the ISO deployment so we can see those, so we can see the difference between the full log and the egrep log.
Let's go ahead and start the deployment process so we can watch this. All right now it is preparing that task we can start reviewing the logs we can see here that it has started the ISO extractor, and then the boot config, and we've created a kickstart file, we can see the target iDRAC here that we are using. We can also log into the iDRAC to review what's happening in there if we need to. At this point we're just interested in what's going on in the logs.
Here we are booting the iDRAC from the ISO currently. You can see it's a lot cleaner to watch the process with the egrep as opposed to seeing the whole log tail by. Here is the boot ISO in the log here. Let me go ahead and show you what I'm looking at here.
On this I've outlined the process for OS deployment in OMIVV. These are the various steps the deployment job started with deploy manage implementation, then it pulls the ISO from our network share, extracts the ISO locally then it validates that the host is available and has the correct licenses.
Then it starts copying the ISO to the staging folder, extracts all the files from it, then it performs the ISO deploy by attaching the ISO to the iDRAC. Then it attaches the ISO to the iDRAC, determines the boot mode for the boot device.
If we're going to be BIOS or UV mode, then it creates the kickstart file. Then it detaches the ISO and calls to boot the iDRAC to the ISO from the network, and then it performs the ISO deploy on the iDRAC. The final step is attaching the host credential profile, this is the command that I ran. Essentially what I've done is, I am writing a tail on the spectre vCenter app log. I'm using egrep, and then I'm passing all of these uh different uh strings that we're looking for separated by the pipe within parens and quotes to the egrep command so that it will only pull lines that contain those strings.
You can see that this presents the information that we're looking for in a much more readable format when we're looking at these logs. We can see that the ISO deployment was completed here in this log so we know that we have successfully deployed ESXi to this host. Some common troubleshooting when deploying an ISO would be if we're missing the license for the iDRAC that would show in here.
Another important troubleshooting step when using OMIVV for deployment of a profile or an ISO is to check the iDRAC web interface. If we're having an issue we can look in the lifecycle log or we can look at the virtual console and see what the server itself is doing if we do not have physical access to the server. This concludes our review of log reading and log collection for OMIVV. Thank you for watching this video, have a great day.
