How to find VMWare ESX Host event messages using VPXV_EVENTS

Question: I’m trying to collate some VM  error alerts for a server outage. As well as OS and SQL Server logs I need to find any event logging for ESX hosts. I’m looking to execute a query on the VCDB database with some date range parameters and a ESX host parameter.

Answer: In VMWare 5.5 it is possible to query the VCDB database Views. There is a wealth of information in these SQL Views. As well as host information such as configurations and other met , there is detailed logging for historical statistics and event logging

Find the Virtual Centre SQL Server Instance supporting your environment and check your login account has read privileges.

If the underlying tables have not been archived the resultset from these views can be large . The improve the response use some filter predicates.

Find the ESX host name by using Query VMWare vCenter VCDB database for guest and host details ...

Once you've found the ESX host decide on the date range.

USE VCDB
GO
select EVENT_ID,
 EVENT_TYPE,
 CREATE_TIME,
 HOST_NAME,DATASTORE_NAME FROM [dbo].[VPXV_EVENTS] 
 WHERE host_name = 'myesx_host.net'
 and CREATE_TIME between '2016-01-20 18:00:00.000' and '2016-01-21 14:00:00.000'
 ORDER BY CREATE_TIME DESC

Some interesting event messages  to consider are:

esx.problem.iorm.nonviworkload

esx.problem.scsi.device.io.latency.high

In a future post , I’ll outline some approaches to troubleshooting these alerts

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