Solution for "No coredump target has been configured. Host core dumps cannot be saved" - VMware ESXi

After some disk changes on one VMware ESXi host i met this error:

"No coredump target has been configured. Host core dumps cannot be saved".

My changes were to remove every local disk on the ESXi host. ESXi installation was made on a SD memory card, therefore there's no room to place core dumps. And this is why ESXi host gives you this warning.

Apparently you must have a local disk in which have a partition to reserve for core dumps, but searching on the web i found a solution for my needs.

With this solution i can continue to have core dumps (even if i can live without they ;-) ) without having local disks.

Here the steps:

What you need before continue:

- ESXi SSH shell enabled and knowledge on hot to connect via SSH (if you don't know how to do that, please follow te white rabbit)

- vCSA AKA vCenter Server Appliance . If you dont' have vCenter at all or have a vCenter installed on Windows platform i'm sorry, you can stop here, or you can try to adapt some part of this tutorial to match the Windows platform.

- connect to the ESXi host with an SSH shell

- type this commend to take note of the vmknic you use to communicate with vCenter server:
esxcfg-vmknic -l
normally you have vmk0 as management nic, but maybe you have an other one

- set remote core dumps with this command:
esxcli system coredump network set --interface-name vmk0 --server-ipv4 192.168.15.8 --server-port 6500

where vmk0 is you management interface that communicate with vCenter Server Appliance, 192.168.15.8 is the ip of your vCSA and 6500 is the standard remote core dumps collector of your vCSA.

- enable remote core dumps with this command:
esxcli system coredump network set --enable true

- verify that all went good:
esxcli system coredump network get
esxcli system coredump network check

- now we can disable local core dumps:

esxcli system coredump file list (if you want to show where and which are this core dumps)
esxcli system coredump file set --enable false
esxcli system coredump file remove --force
esxcli system coredump file list (to show that there's no more core dumps)

- save this strenuous work for next reboots
/sbin/auto-backup.sh

- disable VMkernel.Boot.autoCreateDumpFile
This is an Advanced Setting on the ESXi Host (Configuration > Software > Advanced Settings)
Use the vSphere client to do this.

- reboot the ESXi host to verify that everything you have written is working. If you cannot reboot the host no problem, i live well also without this ;-)