First of all, We will download the files locally in a windows 7 Machine and later on, we will use the vmss2core tool locally to convert to .DMP file.
1) Download and install vmss2core tool:
1.1 Navigate to https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vmss2core.
1.2 On the left hand side, tick "I have read and agree to the Technical Preview", select vmsscore-vmss2core-sb-8456865 and click the Download button.
1.3 Copy the downloaded vmsscore-vmss2core-sb-8456865.exe file to the Windows folder of the client or simply in order to use it, you need to navigate from the cmd line to the path where is saved.
IMPORTANT: PREVIOUS FOLLOW THE STEPS , CREATE A CLEAN SNAPSHOT TO REVERT THE VM LATER ON IN CASE NEEDED, SYMANTEC IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY OF YOUR ACTIONS AND LESS TO REVERT A STATE OF A MACHINE IF YOU DIDN'T TAKE A PREVIOUS SNAPSHOT.
2.) All that you have to do is , reproduce the issue and after reproduce it, create a new snapshot (for every snapshot, a .vmsn (VMware Snapshot) and .vmem (Virtual Memory) file is created. The latter contains the memory state at the time of the snapshot) and suspend the virtual machine (.vmss = VMware Suspended State file).
3) We will need to collect : .vmsn , .vmem and the .vmss files, located int he datastore where the VM is configured.
In order to know in which datastore are these files, there are different ways to know it, but one of them is simply select the VM in the Navigator tree in the vCenter web console go to Actions > and click in Edit Settings...
And click on VM options and check for VM Working Location
After it, simply close the window and go to the Datastores tab , select the one that you have in the configuration of the VM and click on Browse Files
And we will download the .vmsn , .vmem and the .vmss files.
4) Once we have the files download locally in our windows 7 machine.
5) We will go back to the point 1.3 and open our cmd line as administrator and we will navigate where we have saved the vmss2core tool :
7) Once we are in the path that the tool are and the files, we will run the command vmss2core-sb-8456865.exe -W "AVR-win7-64-8b80c17a.vmss""AVR-win7-64-8b80c17a.vmem"
NOTE:
If the guest is a pre-Windows 8/Server 2012 system, run the command "vmss2core –W virtual_machine_name.vmss".
If the guest is a Windows 8/Server 2012 or higher system, run the command "vmss2core –W8 virtual_machine_name.vmss".
If not enough disk space is available, run the command "vmss2core –WK virtual_machine_name.vmss" to convert the suspended VMware virtual machine file to a Windows kernel memory only dump.
And it will start to convert to DMP in the same location.
