Specifications

Red Hat Virtualization

Troubleshooting

This section covers potential issues you may experience in the installation, management, and

general day-to-day operations of your Red Hat Virtualization system(s). This troubleshooting

section covers the error messages, log file locations, system tools, and general approaches to

research data and analyze problems.

1. Logfile Overview and Locations

When deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 with Virtualization into your network

infrastructure, the host's Virtualization software uses many specific directories for important

configuration, log files, and other utilities. All the Red Hat Virtualization logs files are standard

ASCII files, and easily accessable with any ASCII based editor:

• The Red Hat Virtualization main configuration directory is /etc/xen/. This directory contains

the xend daemon and other virtual machine configuration files. The networking script files

reside here as well (in the /scripts subdirectory).

• All of actual log files themselves that you will consult for troubleshooting purposes reside in

the /var/log/xen directory.

• You should also know that the default directory for all virtual machine file-based disk images

resides in the /var/lib/xen directory.

• Red Hat Virtualization information for the /proc file system reside in the /proc/xen/

directory.

2. Logfile Descriptions

Red Hat Virtualization features the xend daemon and qemu-dm process, two utilities that write

the multiple log files to the /var/log/xen/ directory:

• xend.log is the logfile that contains all the data collected by the xend daemon, whether it is a

normal system event, or an operator initiated action. All virtual machine operations (such as

create, shutdown, destroy, etc.) appears here. The xend.log is usually the first place to look

when you track down event or performance problems. It contains detailed entries and

conditions of the error messages.

• xend-debug.log is the logfile that contains records of event errors from xend and the

Virtualization subsystems (such as framebuffer, Python scripts, etc.).

Chapter 18.