Technical Support Resources

VMware ESX Server 2.0

Features | Documentation | Knowledge Base | Discussion Forums

The VMware Web Site

The latest technical support and troubleshooting notes are available on the VMware Web site at www.vmware.com/support/.

VMware Newsgroups

The VMware newsgroups are primarily forums for users to help each other. You are encouraged to read and post issues, work-arounds and fixes. While VMware personnel may read and post to the newsgroups, they are not a channel for official support. The VMware NNTP news server is at news.vmware.com.

The following group is devoted to ESX Server issues:
vmware.esx-server

VMware Community Discussion Forum

The VMware Community is a set of moderated discussion forums hosted on the VMware Web site, and is open to all VMware users. In the forums, VMware Community members come together to exchange information, ask technical questions and share comments. VMware representatives monitor the forum and respond to questions as appropriate. You can join the community discussion forum at www.vmware.com/community.

Reporting Problems

These guidelines describe the information you may be asked to provide when reporting problems.

Be sure to register your serial number. If you are requesting support directly from VMware, then report your problems using the support request form on the VMware Web site at www.vmware.com/requestsupport.

When requesting support from VMware, run the /usr/bin/vm-support script on the service console and save the resulting esx-<date>-<unique-xnumber>.tgz file. This script collects and packages all relevant ESX Server system and configuration information and ESX Server log files. This information can be used to analyze the problem you are encountering.

If a virtual machine exits abnormally or crashes, please save the log file (vmware.log in the same directory as your .vmx file) and any core files (core or vmware-core in that directory). Also, please save the virtual machine's configuration (.vmx) file and any other information that might help reproduce the problem.
Be sure to record a description of your physical hardware and of the software (operating system and applications) that was running in the virtual machine. This information may be required when requesting support.
A problem in the VMkernel normally causes the machine to display an error screen for a period of time and then reboot. If you specified a VMware core dump partition when you configured your machine, the VMkernel also generates a core dump and error log. More serious problems in the VMkernel can freeze the machine without an error screen or core dump.
In either of these cases, when reporting problems directly to VMware describe the steps you took in the period before this failure (including any information listed in point 1 above, if applicable). Include this information in your support request, along with the contents of /var/log/messages from the service console. Also include the core dump and error log, if any. These can be found in files named vmkernel-core.<date> and vmkernel-log.<date> in the /root directory after you reboot your machine.

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