The scratch partition on an ESXi host stores log information and will be set to the RAM drive by default.
This means that any information written there will not survive a reboot, or could interfere with the stability of the host in low memory situations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Getting and setting the scratch location is quite easy with PowerCLi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The code below shows some common usage scenarios of the Get\/Set-AdvancedSetting command with scratch locations.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n# connect to vCenter or host\nconnect-viserver vcenter.testlab.local\n# will ask for credentials\n\n\n# get scratch locaton of host called Host01.testlab.local\nget-vmhost Host01.testlab.local | Get-AdvancedSetting -Name "ScratchConfig.ConfiguredScratchLocation"\n\n# get scratch locaton of all connected hosts\nget-vmhost | Get-AdvancedSetting -Name "ScratchConfig.ConfiguredScratchLocation"\n\n# set the scratch location of Host01 to "\/vmfs\/volumes\/DatastoreName01\/HostLogs-Host01"\nget-vmhost Host01.testlab.local | Get-AdvancedSetting -Name "ScratchConfig.ConfiguredScratchLocation" | Set-AdvancedSetting -Value "\/vmfs\/volumes\/DatastoreName\/HostLogs-Host01"\n\n\n# loop through each host and set the scratch location to "\/vmfs\/volumes\/DataStore011\/HostLogs-(hostname)", removing the domain name from the host name\nforeach ($vHost in get-vmhost)\n{\n write-host "Setting Scratch on host " + $vHost.name + " to " + ("\/vmfs\/volumes\/DataStore01\/HostLogs\/" + (($vHost.name).replace(".testlab.local",''))) -ForegroundColor Yellow\n $vHost | Get-AdvancedSetting -Name "ScratchConfig.ConfiguredScratchLocation" | Set-AdvancedSetting -Value ("\/vmfs\/volumes\/DataStore01\/HostLogs\/" + (($vHost.name).replace(".testlab.local",''))) -Confirm:$false\n}\n\n# same as above but the domain and datastore names are in variables (THE SCRATCH LOCATION PATH IS CASE SENSITIVE)\n# loop through each host and set the scratch location to "\/vmfs\/volumes\/(DataStore)\/HostLogs-(hostname)"\n$DataStore = "NAS002-DS03" #"DataStore01"\n$Domain = ".jase.local" #".testlab.local"\nforeach ($vHost in get-vmhost)\n{\n write-host "Setting Scratch on host " $vHost.name " to " ("\/vmfs\/volumes\/$DataStore\/HostLogs\/" + (($vHost.name).replace($Domain,''))) -ForegroundColor Yellow\n $vHost | Get-AdvancedSetting -Name "ScratchConfig.ConfiguredScratchLocation" | Set-AdvancedSetting -Value ("\/vmfs\/volumes\/$DataStore\/HostLogs\/" + (($vHost.name).replace($Domain,''))) -Confirm:$false\n}\n\n\n\n<\/pre><\/div>\n\n\nThe first example (line 7) will get a specific host and pipe that host object in to the Get-AdvancedSetting command that returns the contents of the advanced host setting ScratchConfig.ConfiguredScratchLocation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second example (line 10) is the same as the first but without the host name. The get-vmhost command will pipe an array of all vmHosts to the Get-AdvancedSetting command, that will list the scratch location for all the hosts you are connected to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The third example (line 13) builds on the first. Here we are piping the output of the Get-AdvancedSetting<\/code> command in to the Set-AdvancedSetting<\/code> command and giving it a basic string. The string or full path is case sensitive.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe fourth example (line 17) loops through each host and uses the host name as part of the scratch path. Very handy for setting multiple hosts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fifth example (line 25) is the same as the fourth except the domain and datastore names are supplied from variables. This makes that piece of code more portable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The scratch partition on an ESXi host stores log information and will be set to the RAM drive by default. This means that any information written there will not survive a reboot, or could interfere with the stability of the host in low memory situations. Getting and setting the scratch location is quite easy with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[15,12,13,14,6],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-powercli","category-powershell","tag-host","tag-powercli","tag-powershell","tag-scratch","tag-vmware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}