Troubleshooting
Support
Citrix provides two forms of support: free, self-help support on the Citrix Support website and paid-for Support Services, which you can purchase from the Support site. With Citrix Technical Support, you can open a Support Case online or contact the support center by phone if you experience technical difficulties.
The Citrix Knowledge Center hosts several resources that might be helpful to you in the event of odd behavior, crashes, or other problems. Resources include: Forums, Knowledge Base articles, White Papers, product documentation, hotfixes, and other updates.
If you experience technical difficulties with the Citrix Hypervisor server, this section is meant to help you solve the problem if possible. If it isn’t possible, use the information in this section to gather the application logs and other data that can help your Solution Provider track and resolve the issue.
For information about troubleshooting Citrix Hypervisor installation issues, see Troubleshoot the installation. For information about troubleshooting virtual machine issues, see Troubleshoot VM problems.
Important:
We recommend that you follow the troubleshooting information in this section solely under the guidance of your Solution Provider or the Support team.
In some support cases, serial console access is required for debug purposes. Therefore, when setting up your Citrix Hypervisor configuration, it is recommended that serial console access is configured. For hosts that do not have physical serial port (such as a Blade server) or where suitable physical infrastructure is not available, investigate whether an embedded management device, such as Dell DRAC can be configured.
For information on setting up serial console access, see CTX121442.
Citrix Hypervisor server logs
XenCenter can be used to gather Citrix Hypervisor server information.
Click Server Status Report in the Tools menu to open the Server Status Report task. You can select from a list of different types of information (various logs, crash dumps, and so on). The information is compiled and downloaded to the machine that XenCenter is running on. For more information, see the XenCenter documentation.
By default, the files gathered for a server status report can be limited in size. If you need log files that are larger than the default, you can run the command xenserver-status-report -u in the Citrix Hypervisor server console.
Important:
Citrix Hypervisor server logs may contain sensitive information.
Sending host log messages to a central server
Rather than have logs written to the control domain filesystem, you can configure your Citrix Hypervisor server to write them to a remote server. The remote server must have the syslogd daemon running on it to receive the logs and aggregate them correctly. The syslogd daemon is a standard part of all flavors of Linux and Unix, and third-party versions are available for Windows and other operating systems.
Set the syslog_destination parameter to the hostname or IP address of the remote server where you want the logs to be written:
xe host-param-set uuid=host_uuid logging:syslog_destination=hostname
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Run the command:
xe host-syslog-reconfigure uuid=host_uuid
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To enforce the change. (You can also run this command remotely by specifying the host parameter.)
XenCenter logs
XenCenter also has client-side log. This file includes a complete description of all operations and errors that occur when using XenCenter. It also contains informational logging of events that provide you with an audit trail of various actions that have occurred. The XenCenter log file is stored in your profile folder. Depending on your version of Windows, the path can be one of the following:
%userprofile%\AppData\Citrix\XenCenter\logs\XenCenter.log%userprofile%\AppData\Citrix\Roaming\XenCenter\logs\XenCenter.log
To locate the XenCenter log files - for example, when you want to open or email the log file - click View Application Log Files in the XenCenter Help menu.
Troubleshooting connections between XenCenter and the Citrix Hypervisor server
If you have trouble connecting to the Citrix Hypervisor server with XenCenter, check the following:
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Is your XenCenter an older version than the Citrix Hypervisor server you are attempting to connect to?
The XenCenter application is backward-compatible and can communicate properly with older Citrix Hypervisor servers, but an older XenCenter cannot communicate properly with newer Citrix Hypervisor servers.
To correct this issue, install the XenCenter version that is the same, or newer, than the Citrix Hypervisor server version.
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Is your license current?
You can see the expiration date for your license access code in the Citrix Hypervisor server General tab under the License Details section in XenCenter.
For more information on licensing a host, see Licensing.
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The Citrix Hypervisor server talks to XenCenter using HTTPS over the following ports:
- Port 443 (a two-way connection for commands and responses using the management API)
- Port 5900 for graphical VNC connections with paravirtualized Linux VMs.
If you have a firewall enabled between the Citrix Hypervisor server and the machine running the client software, ensure that it allows traffic from these ports.
Other troubleshooting information
The following articles provide troubleshooting information about specific areas of the product: