Configuring Network Core Dump With PowerCLI

Jun 17, 2015 powershell vsphere
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The VMware vSphere Network Dump Collector service enables a host to transmit diagnostic information via the network to a remote netdump service, which stores it on disk. Network-based coredump collection can be configured in addition to or instead of disk-based coredump collection. This may be useful in stateless environments with no local disk usable for a diagnostic partition.

vSphere ESXi Dump Collector service pre-packaged with the vSphere vCenter Server Virtual Appliance, and if vCenter on Windows vSphere ESXi Dump Collector typically is installed on same server.

It is a little bit of a pain to configure this on every server, so I wrote this little script to get all hosts and then configure each ESXi host registered with vCenter to point its core dumps to the vCenter.

Add-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core
$vcenter = ''
Connect-VIServer $vcenter
foreach($vmhost in Get-VMHost){
$esxcli = Get-EsxCli -VMHost $vmhost.Name
$esxcli.system.coredump.network.set($null,"vmk0",$vcenter,6500)
$esxcli.system.coredump.network.set(1)
$esxcli.system.coredump.network.get()
}