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What logs do I get when I enable syslog in VCSA 6.5?

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The native remote syslog functionality in the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) for vSphere 6.5 introduces several new changes from vSphere 6.0. With some of the questions that I have been receiving on this topic, I figure it would be useful to take a closer look at some of the different behaviors and configuration differences. Hopefully by the end of this article, you will have a better understanding of the syslog capabilities in VCSA 6.5

Remote Syslog Configuration

In VCSA 6.0, to configure the remote syslog configuration, you needed to use the vSphere Web Client. Although this may have felt like a convenience, it also added an unnecessary dependency on both vCenter Single-Sign On (SSO) and the vSphere Web Client UI. In VCSA 6.5, the remote syslog configurations is now part of the VAMI UI (https://[VCSA]:5480) which is an out-of-band interface that can still function if either SSO or vCenter Server is down. Once you have saved your changes, the syslog client will automatically be restarted for the changes to go into effect. If you wish to disable the remote syslog functionality, simply click on the reset button.


Note: If you decide to use port 1514, I have found that you must use the TLS protocol rather than TCP or else it will not work.

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Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 7

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In the previous article (Part 6), we demonstrated how you can easily associate the list of VMDKs to their respective OS partitions within a VCSA or PSC node, which is useful when you need to increase the disk capacity for a specific OS partition. In Part 7, we are now going to drill down a bit further into the underlying filesystem and retrieve both the storage capacity as well as utilization of each partition.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

There is not a granular view of the individual OS partitions within the VAMI UI (https://[VCSA]:5480). However, this information is available as part of the VAMI information when logged into the vSphere Web Client by navigating to System Configuration->Nodes->Monitor->Storage as shown in the screenshot below.


The workflow for retrieving the storage statistics using the VAMI APIs is also applicable for retrieving other statistics such as compute, memory and networking. You first need to retrieve the list of VAMI Statistic IDs that are available from the monitoring API endpoint which is demonstrated with the Get-VAMIStatsList function. From each VAMI Stat ID, you can also drill down further to get more details such as description and the unit of measurement. Once you have the Stat IDs that you are interested in, you can then perform a query based on a specific set of search criteria which can be time range (start and stop time), interval, etc. To demonstrate how the query API works, I have created the Get-VAMIStorageUsed function to demonstrate its usage.

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/monitoring
  • GET /appliance/monitoring/query

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output

The first function Get-VAMIStatsList does exactly as it sounds, it simply lists all VAMI Stat IDs that are available. Most of the Stat ID names are pretty descriptive but you can always retrieve more information by performing a GET on /appliance/monitoring/[VAMI-STAT-ID].


As stated in the beginning, we are interested in the grabbing the storage stats. The Get-VAMIStorageUsed function takes a subset of the VAMI Stats ID, specifically the storage ones that map to the OS partitions and retrieves both the total and used capacity (MB) as shown in the screenshot below.

Exploring new VCSA VAMI API w/PowerCLI: Part 6

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In Part 6, we will take a look at how we can use the new VAMI APIs to easily associate the underlying VMDKs to their respective OS disk partitions for a VCSA or PSC node. In addition, the workflow of increasing the disk capacity for a specific partition has also been simplified further with the new VAMI APIs. After increasing the specific VMDK size, we can now also trigger the partition resize operation using the VAMI APIs, where as before this used to be a manual task that required SSH access. In vSphere 6.5, there have been a few minor changes to the VCSA's VMDK layout and sizes, for more details, please have a look at this blog post here.

VAMI UI Area of Focus

Unfortunately, there is not a page within the VAMI UI (https://[VCSA]:5480) that either lists or provides the actual mapping of the underlying VMDKs to their respective partition types. You can see the different VMDKs using the vSphere Web/C# Client, but historically the mapping of VMDK to partition type was done manually or you would refer to the table found in the blog post referenced above. Lets see if we can pull this information without needing to go to a UI 🙂

VAMI APIs Used

  • GET /appliance/system/storage
  • POST /appliance/system/storage/resize

PowerCLI Function

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