How to capture memory dump of a z/VM guest?

Solution Unverified - Updated

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as a z/VM Guest
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 to 6.2 as z/VM Guest

Issue

  • How to capture memory dump of a z/VM guest ?
  • How to capture memory dump of a running guest from z/VM ?
  • How to capture memory dump of a unresponsive Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 system ?
  • Does kdump work on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 ?
  • Unble to get kdump working on s390 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 System ?. Following message is noticed while starting kdump service
service kdump restart
Memory for crashkernel is not reserved
Please reserve memory by passing "crashkernel=X@Y" parameter to the kernel
Stopping kdump:[FAILED]

Resolution

Kdump feature in s390 architecture was introduced only with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 update 3. Use VMDUMP as mentioned in the Content from public.dhe.ibm.com is not included.IBM Documentation: Using Dump Tools . For Handling large dumps, refer Chapter 9 of the same documentation.

Root Cause

Even though kexec/kdump is available in RHEL 5, many of the features required for kdump are not enabled in RHEL 5 for zVM.

SBR
Product(s)
Components
Category
Tags

This solution is part of Red Hat’s fast-track publication program, providing a huge library of solutions that Red Hat engineers have created while supporting our customers. To give you the knowledge you need the instant it becomes available, these articles may be presented in a raw and unedited form.