kdump

The kdump tool is made available through a Linux® kernel and initial RAM disk that are preloaded in memory, along with a production system.

You do not have to install kdump on a dedicated dump device. The kdump system can access the memory that contains the dump of the production system through a procfs file.

Filtering out extraneous memory pages and compression can take place while the dump is written to persistent storage or transferred over a network. The smaller dump size can significantly reduce the write or transfer time, especially for large production systems.

Because kdump can write dumps through a network, existing file system facilities can be used to prevent multiple dumps from being written to the same storage space. Sharing space for dumps across an enterprise is possible.