Configure Dump Collector with PowerCLI in vSphere 6

PowerCLI, vSphere, ,

I had a script to configure Dump Collector settings that I used in previous versions of vSphere.  If you look around the web, you’ll find similar PowerCLI snippets to configure Dump Collector.

If you use that snippet in vSphere 6, it doesn’t work.  You’ll get the following error:

Message: Cannot set 2 server ip parameters.;
InnerText: Cannot set 2 server ip parameters.EsxCLI.CLIFault.summary
At line:4 char:1

This is because ESXCLI now has a parameter for whether to use IPv6, so when using get-esxcli, invoking the method to set requires an additional value.  Remember, esxcli is not intuitive in that “enabled” properties are either true or null, so don’t use $false.

The revised code should now be:

$vcenterip = '192.168.1.10'
foreach($vmhost in Get-VMHost){
	$esxcli = Get-EsxCli -VMHost $vmhost.Name
	$esxcli.system.coredump.network.set($null,"vmk0",$null,$vcenterip,6500)
	$esxcli.system.coredump.network.set($true)
	$esxcli.system.coredump.network.get()
}

Also not something commonly found on the internet – can you test the ESXi netdump configuration?  Yep!

foreach($vmhost in Get-VMHost){
$esxcli = Get-EsxCli -VMHost $vmhost.Name
Write-Host "Checking dump collector on host $vmhost.name"
$esxcli.system.coredump.network.check()
}

And there you have it!