Knowledge Base

During a host failure with a purple diagnostic screen, VMware ESX/ESXi attempts to save diagnostic information to one or more pre-configured locations. The available target locations and the methods for configuring the host differ between versions of ESX/ESXi.

If the host has been configured with a location for saving a coredump, but does not successfully record a coredump during a purple diagnostic screen, there may be problems with either the storage medium or the connection to the storage medium. To successfully capture diagnostic information from a subsequent outage, configure an alternate target for saving the coredump.

Host Configuration

• Network Dump Collection
  
  ESXi 5.0 hosts can dump diagnostic information to a Network Dump Collector service via the network. For more information, see:
  
  
  • Network Dump Collector in VMware vSphere (1032051)
    
  • Configuring an ESXi 5.0 host to capture a VMkernel coredump from a purple diagnostic screen via the Network Dump Collector (2002955)
    
    
• Disk Dump Collection
  
  ESX/ESXi 3.0-5.0 hosts can dump diagnostic information to a partition on disk, including local or remote block devices. For more information, see:
  
  
  • Configuring an ESXi 5.0 host to capture a VMkernel coredump from a purple diagnostic screen to a diagnostic partition (2004299)
    
  • Configuring an ESX/ESXi 3.0-4.1 host to capture a VMkernel coredump from a purple diagnostic screen to a diagnostic partition (2004297)
    
  
  Note: ESX 3.0-4.1 can also generate a coredump from the service console Linux kernel. The VMKcore diagnostic coredump partition is used to store the VMkernel coredump, but the service console coredump is placed on a VMFS datastore. Depending on the type of failure, a coredump can be generated from one or both components. For more information, see Configuring an ESX host to capture a Service Console coredump (1032962).