About the Add-on

Install the Splunk Add-on for vCenter onto your VMware vCenter machines to collect vCenter log data.

Important: We do not support the vSphere 5 VMware vCenter Server Virtual Appliance (a Linux-based virtual machine) on Linux.

Are you ready to install the Add-on

You are ready to install the Add-on, if you have:

1. Configured your indexers to correctly set the timezone for vCenter (VC) log files in $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps/Splunk_TA_vcenter/local/props.conf. See "Set the time zone for vCenter log files".
2. Installed a universal forwarder (UF) or light forwarder (LF) on your vCenter Server machines, if one did not already exist, so that you can forward data to your indexers.
3. Created an outputs.conf file (if one did not exist already) on each forwarder on a vCenter machine to send VMware data to your indexers. See "Configure outputs.conf" in this manual. For more information about setting up forwarding, see Configure forwarders with outputs.conf in the Distributed Deployment Manual.

To install the Splunk Add-on for vCenter, you must have:

1. Login access to your vCenter machines.
2. An untar utility (such as gzip) on a Windows machine. Get it from http://www.gzip.org/#exe. For more information on how to use this utility, see http://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man1/gzip.1.asp.