Update – this blog applies to SRM 4 and SRM 5. In both cases you should follow the suggestions in this article.
I have been very busy working on our next major release of SRM (and wow! is it ever going to be powerful and cool!) and as a result I have not spent as much time with our current release as I would like and that has meant less blog activities. But I was working on something yesterday and I realized that we did not have the detail in the logs I wanted. And I knew I was looking at a blog article! So, in the spirit of getting better SRM support for you, like in this blog, here is a suggestion.
If you have a situation where the SRM logs are getting full very fast, such as with an SRA that is generating really a lot of log entries, you may end up working your way through all of the logs, and by the time support sees the logs, the cause of the problem has rotated right through them, and is not visible any longer. This is because by default we limit the number of logs to 10, and the size of each to 5 MB – we do not know how much space you will have on drive C so we need to be very conservative. So this may not always be enough. I would suggest changing these parameters using the information below.
These settings are not part of advanced settings, and so will need to be done in the vmware-dr.xml file. Make a backup copy of it first. You will need to make these changes at both sites, and will require SRM to be restarted on each side – so make sure it is not in use first.
Locate the SRM folder, and in it find the config folder.
You should now be able to find the vmware-dr.xml file.
Use something like notepad to edit this file.
Look for the section in this file that is denoted by <log>.
You will need to add the following lines between the <log> and </log>.
Where x should be the maximum file size – default 5 MB, and where y should be the maximum number of log files – default is 10.
You will know how much space you have, but it might be a start to use a max file size of 10 MB and a maximum number of files of 20. Think about how much disk space you have carefully.
You will need to restart the SRM service for this change to be active.
The log location may vary BTW, so remember this:
Pre Windows 2008 (maybe R2 timeframe) the logs are in:
C:Documents and SettingsAll UsersApplication DataVMwareVMware Site Recovery ManagerLogs
Post Windows 2008 (maybe R2 timeframe) the logs are in:
c:ProgramDataVMwareVMware vCenter Site Recovery Managerlogs
Here is what your vmware-dr.xml file should look like after you make the change.
Note that the red arrows point at what we added, and the blue arrow points at what was already there.
Since this is an admin type blog, I wanted to push another admin type article I wrote. Did you see the one about the Recommended Alarms for SRM Admins to watch? Check it out here. My experience is that many SRM customers are not monitoring SRM, and while there is not a lot to monitor, and not many issues, the fact is that since it is your DR solution, you need to make sure you are always aware of any issues!
