Scratch Space on the ESXi host

I have had issues in the past where the vm-support script will not work because it says the "/var/tmp is not found (Working on 4.1 here).  "
-or-
"Could not copy /var/log to tar area (/var/tmp/vm-support-Server) (err 1)."
"Have you run out of disk space?"

Running ESXi on a limited disk storage or RAM disk can cause issues so I found a couple great KB articles that talk about placing these scratch spaces on alternate storage.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&externalId=1033696
and
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1037190

 And I have had to use this if you are running any sort of vm-support command script, ESXupdate and any type of information that may need to be stored temporarily on the ESXi server.  This is a great thing to setup in the initial stages of your deployment (especially if you are running ESXi on a USB or as Embedded) as it requires a reboot to enable this feature.

Comments

Anonymous said…
With vm-support command you can use -w modifier to set an alternate location, and you can use a datastore to allocate the files.