SAP Basis Tech Supports

Symptom
“vm-support” – Script for gathering VMware debugging information.
Other terms
VMware, ESX, Windows, Linux, Support, virtualization
Reason and Prerequisites
You have problems with a VMWare instance and need to open a problem ticket at SAP (BC-OP-NT-ESX or BC-OP-LNX-ESX) or at VMWare.
Solution
If you open a problem ticket at SAP or at VMWare, the support organizations may be able to help you much quicker, if they have every important information about your system without the need to ask you for specific information.
Thus, it’s very beneficial, if you attach all needed information to the problem ticket, and the “vm-support” script provides most information which is needed by SAP and VMWare.
In principle, vm-support is a script that creates a tar archive containing debugging information about the server. vm-support has three main uses:
gathering general debugging information,gathering performance information,gathering information about a specific virtual machine.
A gzipped tar archive containing the gathered data is created in the current or specified directory. The resulting tar archive will be named esx-{date}.{PID}.tgz.
Using the script:

For VMware ESX 3.5 and the VI Client connected to VirtualCenter, the Export Diagnostic Data function provides a dialog box where you can select the hosts to download logs for. If the VI Client is connected to an VMware ESX 3.5 Server host, the Export Diagnostic Data feature displays a standard Save dialog box. The host logs are saved to the specified location.
To run the vm-support script, click the Export Diagnostic Data button in the System Logs tab panel toolbar, or choose File > Export > Export Diagnostic Data in VI or VC Client.
To run the script from the VMware ESX server console just type /usr/bin/vm-support. More information about posible options for the script you can find in the manual page for vm-support.
For doing a performance snapshot and collecting all data in one single command, type
/usr/bin/vm-support -N -s -d300 -i5
This will collect performance data for 300 seconds with an interval of 5 seconds. You should let the interval at 5. You can expand the duration, but be aware that the file size increases. To provide the most useful information to our support, execute this at the same time your incident happens.
You should upload the generated file to sapserv as described in SAP Note 40024. Additionally, write a detailed description of the problem to the problem message. If we receive this information directly, we can avoid spending a lot of time on queries when we process your problem message and, consequently, the entire process of solving the problem will be much faster.
Additional notes for the script:
It may take several minutes to execute the script.You can display the collected information by uncompressing the esx-{date}.{PID}.tgz file.