Hi everyone,

I recently upgraded the production servers to VMware Server 1.0.5 and also upgraded the VMware MUI package. The MUI (Web-based Management Interface) is useful when you need to restart a VM, reallocate VM memory and perform other maintenance tasks, but you don’t have access to the VMware Server Console or VirtualCenter.

The MUI is driven by Apache 1.3.31, and as such, it generates the familiar log files:

/var/log/vmware-mui/access_log
/var/log/vmware-mui/error_log
/var/log/vmware-mui/ssl_engine_log
/var/log/vmware-mui/ssl_request_log

However, after a while, the log directory tends to fill up:

# ls -larS
total 78988
drwxr-xr-x  14 root root     4096 Apr  7 11:58 ..
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root     4096 May  9  2007 .
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    53985 Mar 24 09:20 error_log
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  8280230 Apr  7 12:59 access_log
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  9955524 Apr  7 12:59 ssl_request_log
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 62473978 Apr  7 12:59 ssl_engine_log

Ok, it’s only 78Mb so far, but why wait until the logs fill up the disk? Since the VMware Server host is running RHEL4, it came pre-installed with logrotate, and an existing configuration for the standard Apache log rotation can be easily adapted for the VMware Server MUI. Just place the following in /etc/logrotate.d/httpd.vmware:

/var/log/vmware-mui/*log {
    missingok
    notifempty
    sharedscripts
    postrotate
        /bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/httpd.vmware.pid 2>/dev/null` 2> /dev/null || true
    endscript
}

The default settings in /etc/logrotate.conf also take effect during rotation and you can enable log file compression and length of retention in there.

Keep in touch,
Greg
SourceHosting.net, LLC