I am currently troubleshooting some minor issues in my homelab and therefore needed to get more information about the ESXi <–> NSX-Controller interaction (Picture taken from the VMware’s Reference Design: VMware® NSX for vSphere).
Therefore I wanted to increase the detail-level of the netcpa.log file.
To do so, go to your ESXi shell (direct or via SSH) and make a backup of the original netcpa.xml configuration file.
cp /usr/lib/vmware/netcpa/etc/netcpa.xml /usr/lib/vmware/netcpa/etc/netcpa.xml.bak
Next step would be to make the netcpa.xml file writeable (I know I am lazy, but since we revert the old .xml file after our troubleshooting I can deal with it).
chmod +wt /usr/lib/vmware/netcpa/etc/netcpa.xml
afterwards change the following section in the file from info to verbose or trivia:
<!– log level is one of the 2 user configurable setting –>
<!– configurable levels : panic, error, warning, info, verbose, trivia –>
<!– log levels are listed in increasing amount of logging done –>
<!– use trivia to get most detailed logging for providing logs to VMware Support –>
…
<level>infoverbose or trivia</level>
Restart the services on your host services.sh restart (Don’t do that if you have LACP up and running – that might cause problems)
Have fun observing via
tail -f /var/log/netcpa.log
the communication between ESXi’s userworld netcpa and the corresponding NSX-Controller.