ESXi 5.0 Host Log Files

• /var/log/auth.log: ESXi Shell authentication success and failure.
  
  
• /var/log/dhclient.log: DHCP client service, including discovery, address lease requests and renewals.
  
  
• /var/log/esxupdate.log: ESXi patch and update installation logs.
  
  
• /var/log/hostd.log: Host management service logs, including virtual machine and host Task and Events, communication with the vSphere Client and vCenter Server vpxa agent, and SDK connections.
  
  
• /var/log/shell.log: ESXi Shell usage logs, including enable/disable and every command entered. For more information, see the Managing vSphere with Command-Line Interfaces section of the vSphere 5 Command Line documentation and Auditing ESXi Shell logins and commands in ESXi 5.x (2004810).
  
• /var/log/sysboot.log: Early VMkernel startup and module loading.
  
  
• /var/log/boot.gz : A compressed file that contains boot log information and can be read using zcat /var/log/boot.gz|more .
  
  
• /var/log/syslog.log: Management service initialization, watchdogs, scheduled tasks and DCUI use.
  
  
• /var/log/usb.log: USB device arbitration events, such as discovery and pass-through to virtual machines.
  
  
• /var/log/vobd.log: VMkernel Observation events, similar to vob.component.event.
  
  

• /var/log/vmkernel.log: Core VMkernel logs, including device discovery, storage and networking device and driver events, and virtual machine startup.
  
  
• /var/log/vmkwarning.log: A summary of Warning and Alert log messages excerpted from the VMkernel logs.
  
  
• /var/log/vmksummary.log: A summary of ESXi host startup and shutdown, and an hourly heartbeat with uptime, number of virtual machines running, and service resource consumption. For more information, see Format of the ESXi 5.0 vmksummary log file (2004566).
  
  

Note: For information on sending logs to another location such as a datastore or remote syslog server, see   Configuring syslog on ESXi 5.0 (2003322)