As part of the VCAP6 – DCV  we are going to perform Objective 1.1 Configure ESXi host to use a central Syslog Server

For the complete VCAP – DCV Checklist visit Checklist

Open the VSphere Client and go to Home and then you will find the Network Syslog Collector icon there.

Once you click on the icon it will give you more information on the Syslog such as the listening ports log collector path, Log rotation period etc.

If you later decide to change any of the above settings you can very well do it by editing a config file available under below location.

Before directly editing the file create a backup of the config file and stop the VMware Syslog Collector service once the configuration changes are done you can overwrite the file and start the VMware Syslog Collector service.

Before we configure the ESXi host for syslog collection it is necessary that we allow the syslog ports on ESXi firewall.

Select the VMHost and click on Configuration>Security Profile> and click on Firewall Properties.

Then enable the syslog ports.

Syslog can also be enabled using below command.

esxcli network firewall ruleset set -r syslog -e true

Let’s configure the syslogging feature on the host by selecting the VMHost>Configuration>Advanced Settings then change the value of Syslog.global.loghost value to vcenter01.renlabs.local

The same can be achieved through command line as below.

esxcli system syslog config set –loghost vcenter01.renlabs.local

The successful logging can be verified if you navigate to below mentioned folder in your Syslog collector server. Corresponding VMHost folders will be created seen in the screenshot.

C:\programdata\vmware\vcenterserver\data\vmsyslogcollector