As we are talking about unnoticed new features on vSphere 6, I’d like to point out a “kind” of new feature, why I say kind ?!? Well mainly because it has been there before, but only available on appliances vCenter and not on the Windows one. Now it has been improved and is working consistently between both platforms. I’m talking about vCenter Watchdog.
What’s vCenter Watchdog ?
vCenter Watchdog is a high availability feature design to improve the uptime of vCenter services. It monitors them and in case of failure it restart them, making the vCenter available again, in case watchdog cannot restart the service it will leverage HA (High Availability) to restart the VM itself.
How do I enable it ?
You don’t have to, it’s enable by default. One caveat, on Windows servers, after vCenter installation, you need to restart the server once to make watchdog works.
Is there any logs ?
Sure, you can check all it’s activities on the following location:
Windows vCenter: “vCenter_Installation_Dir”\vCenterServer\Logs\iiad\
Appliance vCenter: /var/log/vmware/iiad/
But that it’s not all, Watchdog generates support bundles before restarting the service or the VM and can be found at:
Windows vCenter: “vCenter_Installation_Dir”\vCenterServer\data\core\*tgz
Appliance vCenter: /storage/core/*.tgz
There remains one last question:
Who watches the watchdog ?!?!
