Friday, May 24, 2019

Syslog.global.logHost is invalid or exceeds the maximum number of characters permitted

I have a customer who has a pretty decent vSphere environment and uses VMware vRealize LogInsight as a central syslog server for advanced troubleshooting and actionable loging. VMware vRealize LogInsight is tightly integrated with vSphere so it configures syslog configuration on ESXi hosts automatically through vCenter API. Everything worked fine but one day customer realized there is the issue with one and only one ESXi host.

He saw the following failed vCenter task in his vSphere Client.


The error message:
setting["Syslog.global.logHost"] is invalid or exceeds the maximum number of characters permitted
seemed very strange to me.

From ESXi logs collected by LogInsight was evident that ESXi advanced setting cannot be configured through API. However, the same or similar issue can be reproduced by esxcli command for setting the advanced parameter.

Command:
esxcli system settings advanced set -o /Syslog/global/logHost -s “udp://1.2.3.4:514”

Output:
Unable to find branch Syslog

The resolution of this problem was to configure syslog configuration (as described in my older blog post here) instead of setting advanced parameter /Syslog/global/logHost.

The command to configure remote syslog is
esxcli system syslog config set --loghost='tcp://1.2.3.4:514'  help customer to resolve the issue.

I have never seen this issue in other vSphere environments so hope this helps to at least one other person from VMware community.

No comments: