Resolved syslog error: Call OptionManager.UpdateValues for object ha-adv-options on ESXi failed

March 28, 2018 02:29PM

I configured successfully syslog on esxi server around thousand of esxi server in my environment with Configure syslog on VMware ESXi hosts: VMware best practices. But while configuring syslog on few esxi server I receive below error. In the Esxi edit advanced option on Syslog.global.logHost it was showing A general system error occurred: internal error.

I can see same message under Esxi >> Monitor tab >> Tasks and Events with message, Update option values: A general system error occurred: internal error

I decided to chek and configure syslog advanced settings directly connecting to esxi, but was seeing different error.

Call “OptionManager.UpdateValues” for object “ha-adv-options” on ESXi failed.

First troubleshooting diagnosis should be checked is, login to esxi server using putty, then verify nslookup and ping is working for syslog server correctly. also check ports is reachable vice versa using nc -z command. In my case there was a issue with dns name resolution but IP was pinging.

If everything ok and you are still facing issues, to troubleshoot further on esxi putty tried set syslog using below command.
esxcli system syslog config set –loghost=syslogserver.vcloud-lab.com:514

This shown new error Got no data from process, ideally in the background it is running esxcfg-syslog command as below, and it is another command to run it.
/usr/lib/vmware/vmsyslog/bin/esxcfg-syslog --plugin=esxcli --loghost='syslogserver.vcloud-lab.com:514'

Next to troubleshoot it further I checked hostd.log with below command.

less /var/log/hostd.log

Upon analyzing I found it is showing errors due to some MemoryError. As it can be seen from below screenshot.

Next to resolve the same, restart syslog process daemon. First we need to know the ID number of syslog process, which can be found using command.
ps | grep -i syslog

The second number shown in the list is the process ID, using command kill ProcessID restarts syslog service daemon. Again running ps | grep -i syslog, I see it has got another ID now, it is kind of refreshed, reloaded now.

Next I can verify using same esxcli command to set syslog and it doesn't show any error message now, I also verified the same on VMware web client, configuration is modified successfully and then on syslog server checked, logs are getting gathered, everything is good.