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Quick Tip - Monitoring ESXi remote syslog forwarding

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When an ESXi host is unable to forward its logs to a remote syslog server, a VMkernel Observation (VOB) is automatically raised by the host and it can be used to proactively alert administrators, which has been possible since ESXi 5.0 .... per this blog post from 2012 after some Googling! 😅😂

While I was pretty confident the behavior described above still holds true for our latest ESXi 7.x and 8.x releases, I wanted to be sure before responding back to a colleague. I deployed the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 3q and ESXi 8.0 Update 3b and after configuring syslog forwarding, I disabled the NIC on my Aria Operations for Logs to simulate a network disconnect and I saw the following log entry in /var/log/vobd.log

2024-09-28T21:12:00.298Z: [UserLevelCorrelator] 7452916537us: [esx.problem.vmsyslogd.remote.failure] The host "192.168.30.62:514" has become unreachable. Remote logging to this host has stopped.

By default, ESXi will attempt to retry the remote syslog connection after the configured timeout (default 180 seconds), which is a relatively new configuration option that is available with ESXCLI (esxcli system syslog config set --default-timeout XX).

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Quick Tip - API for Broadcom Security Advisories

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Broadcom publishes all security advisories within the Broadcom Support Portal (BSP), under Security Advisories on left hand navigation, which will take you to https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/security-advisory page.


You can also view specific Broadcom Division security advisories, by providing the specific Broadcom Division Segment ID, which also does not require a login to view.

Here is a table of all Broadcom Software Divisions that currently publishes security advisories:

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How much Virtual Machine memory is using NVMe Tiering?

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I know many in the VMware Community have upgraded to vSphere 8.0 Update 3 to play with the exciting new NVMe Tiering feature, especially for testing various workloads including deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) for homelab or testing purposes.

A question that has come up a few times now is how do I check the amount of VM memory that has been offloaded to Tier 1 memory (NVMe Tiering) versus using Tier 0 memory (DRAM)?

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