VMware Communities : Unanswered Threads - VMware Infrastructure™

Suggestions/Best Practises for Moving a 1.5TB RAID to Virtual Disk

EddieA — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:11:59 GMT

OK, I'm giving up on the idea of trying to make my 1.5TB RAID show up as either a passthru device, or an RDM, as nothing I've found/tried seems to work. So, I'm thinking of using the RAID as a DataStore and moving the current contents of my RAID to Virtual disks, stored in that DataStore. So, what's the consenus of the best way to set this up.

It's configured as a RAID 5, and currently, the whole 1.5TB is defined as a single Physical Volume, and I've carved out, so far, 6 Logical Volumes, with 1 or 2 more planned in the near future. So, do I either:

Define the complete RAID as a single disk, and contine to use LVM.

Define each Logical Volume as an individual Virtual disk. I know I can still "expand" these, if needed, using the supplied tools.

Or, yet again, do I go down the route of installing a NAS Appliance, in ESXi, and use that to control the data. If so, then the same 2 questions asked above are still relevent, but in a different context.

Any input and/or suggestions would be gratefully received.

Cheers,

Eddie

ResourcePool.updateConfig failure in /var/log/vmware/hostd.log

tascheHyaene — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:25:46 GMT

Good afteroon,

I'm running a two-node ESX 3.5 cluster with vCenter 2.5. The cluster is running fine, and I recently started scouring logs looking for anything peculiar, just in case.

On one of the nodes, about every 10 minutes or so, two processes start and end in quick secession:

From /var/log/vmware/hostd.log:

~~2009-11-20 12:56:31.962 'TaskManager' 23034800 info~~ Task Created : haTask-ha-root-pool-vim.ResourcePool.updateConfig-270185
~~2009-11-20 12:56:31.962 'TaskManager' 23034800 info~~ Task Completed : haTask-ha-root-pool-vim.ResourcePool.updateConfig-270185
~~2009-11-20 12:56:32.032 'TaskManager' 21621680 info~~ Task Created : haTask-ha-root-pool-vim.ResourcePool.updateConfig-270186
~~2009-11-20 12:56:32.032 'TaskManager' 21621680 info~~ Task Completed : haTask-ha-root-pool-vim.ResourcePool.updateConfig-270186

After doing a vmware-vim-cmd vimsvc/task list, the output informs me that the process isn't running or the process never existed.

But like clockwork, about 10 minutes after the two tasks complete, I receive the following, again from /var/log/vmware/hostd.log:

~~2009-11-20 13:06:32.128 'PropertyCollector' 21621680 warning~~ GetPropertyProvider failed for haTask-ha-root-pool-vim.ResourcePool.updateConfig-270185
~~2009-11-20 13:06:32.129 'PropertyCollector' 21621680 warning~~ GetPropertyProvider failed for haTask-ha-root-pool-vim.ResourcePool.updateConfig-270186

Am I correct in assuming that 270185 and 270186 are references to specific processes?

If so, then why is the process ending and then reporting 10 minutes later that GetPropertyProvider failed? I'm guessing that the ESX box is trying to update the config on one or more resource pools, but why is it failing and should I be concerned?

The Internets and the google did not provide many tasty conclusive morsels in regards to this warning/failure and everything on both ESX boxes is running ok. I just want to make sure that this isn't part of something larger or will become part of something larger later on down the line.

Any opinions/questions/insights would be heartily welcomed.

Best P2V software

arturka — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:21:54 GMT

Currently I'm looking around for P2V software with some special features:

has to support Win2k hot block based migration with synchronization after first main migration

This is what I've found:

vConverter4 - I'm going to check it
Platespin8.1.1 - is supporting Win2K but I had a lot of problems with this tool when i was trying to use on Win2K as source servers
Vmware converter - supporting live migration of Win2k but without synchronization

Double take Move - doesn't support Win2K

Does anyone know any other software ?

Best Regards

Artur

Too Many Levels of Redo files

seanhsmith — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:58:05 GMT

The VM would not boot this morning and had the error cannot read vmdk.... "Too Many Levels of Redo files"

The following sysmtoms occurred to a VM on an ESX Host
• Last change was a commvault update on Tuesday.
• The file server required a reboot after the update.
• The reboot was o scheduled for 4 Am this morning (Friday)
• According to the performance dataThe server fell over at 904pm yesterday evening. (Thursday) so the scheduled reboot never occurred.?
• There are 3 redo files from the 17th
• And 100 redo files started to be created at 8pm yesterday According to the performance data the server fellover at 9 but the redo files continued to be created up until 7am this morning.

The server created 100 or so redo files. I am currently cloning the individual hard drives according to.
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1004545

I am hoping this will resolve the issue.

I would be interested in alternative resolutions and also information about the redo process. Specifically my questions are?
Could I have deleted the redo files?
Is there a command to commit the redo files without having to clone?
Is there a log that references all of the files.?

I have read a couple of articles pertaining to earlier versions of ESX but they no longer seem to be relevant. for examle the vmware-cmd -commit and vmkfstools did not seem to do anything or were no longer valid commands.

Is there a source of knowledge on the commands and the process that relates to ESX 3.5

Many thanks!!

ESX 3.5 VM File Server and slow initial conneciton/timeout

kf4ape — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:14:31 GMT

All,
I have a file server VM (30gb total) and will occasionally have a slow inital connection via UNC however the ESX is on GigE. the server hosting it is a DL385g5p (dual quad cores) and the it sites on an MSA60 connected via a P800...it no slouch and there is one other VM on the box (the VC) which shows no activity...the VM was initiall created on an ESX3.0.2 box and coverted over to 3.5

so what is happening is that the network map to it looses connection and the delay kill the autoreconnect by the client...the end user connects to other shares without issue, just this one file server (which is VM)

thoughts?

OpenSSH GSSAPI allows elevated privileges

tupelo.operations — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:42:27 GMT

Would any of you guys know what patch addresses the {color:#000000}"OpenSSH GSSAPI allows elevated privileges" vulnerability? During a scan, 1 of our 11 ESX 3.5U4 hosts was dinged for this...no idea why the other 10 weren't. Any information would be appreciated.{color}

Message was edited by: Texiwill: Removed microsoft word foo

StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:16:2:0 status = 24/0 0x0 0x0 0x0

ronaldpj — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:54:13 GMT

Hi all,

We are seeing some information in /var/log/vmkernel that worries us somewhat. We don't have any actual problems, but a lot of messages. The messages occur on 13 hosts in one site which are all connected to the same LUNs. The LUNs exist on iSCSI based storage devices from EMC (AX4 and CX4) and Equalogic. The messages relate to LUNs which exist on all three storage devices.

This is an example message:
Nov 19 10:31:56 lin-ict-esx22 vmkernel: 89:15:31:38.094 cpu0:1024)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:16:2:0 status = 24/0 0x0 0x0 0x0

Every 5 minutes we get somewhere between 10 to 60 messages (depending on the host), targetting different paths. Sometimes one path gives multiple messages in a row (sometimes up to 20). Over all the hosts combined, all LUNs on all storage devices are mentioned, so it is not a specific LUN or storage device which gives this error.
The 13 hosts are all ESX3.5U3. In the same site and connected to the same storage, we also have 2 ESX4 hosts. They do not report anything related to this error.

On another site with roughly the same configuration (hosts are running ESX3.5U2 instead of U3), we don't have anything resembling these messages.

Reading through the forum and on different sites, we see this message being about a SCSI Reservation Conflict.

Can anyone give us some information about this?

ESX 3.5 Update 4: unable to detect cd-rom

mbx369 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:48:47 GMT

Hi,

I have 2 ESX servers on HP ProLiant DL580 G5. Somehow, I am unable to detect the cd-rom.
But the drives are definitely ok, coz bootable from cd.
I also have 2 HP ProLiant DL380 G6. But these two are working fine.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

I had posted in this thread http://communities.vmware.com/message/1290101 but i think that thread's been closed.

~~~~~ To Live Is To Die ~~~~~

Command for changing System Resource Allocation Settings - CPU shares, reservations

hodnov — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:15:46 GMT

Is there a command in the vimsh set or otherwise that will change the System Resource Allocation settings of an ESX host?

I need to change the Cpu shares to 4000 and the reservation to 1000 mhz.

I know these values get stored in etc/vmware/esx.conf, but the entries get populated only after you alter the defaults in VI Client.

I want to make the changes during a scripted esx install.

Thanks

Virtualize Unix server

manojpeter — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:33:25 GMT

Hi,

I am trying to virtualize unix machine using VM Converter software. Please advise the steps to achieve this?

Thanks in Advance.

Big Problem - need Help - no more space for redo log

pawaq — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:36:23 GMT

Hi!

I have an 3.5 esxi Server Build 153875 running.
One Server (Windows SBS2003) was virtualised. Ther Server has to Partitions. C/E C= 30 GB E=200 GB
Unfortunatly i did'nt had enough space left on the disk so, after I did one snapshot i forgot to delete this snapshot.
In the meanwhile the server is on hold and this Virtual Maschine message occures:

msg.hbacommon.outofspace: There is no mor space for the redo log of xxxx.vmdk

I have 2 options

1 retry , "you are able to continuethis session by freeing disk space on the relevant partition"

or

2 abort to terminate.

What will happen when i press terminate?

Removing the snapshot is not possibel because this option is#nt offered to me by the system.

How can i solve this problem? By attaching one more disk?

I have an raidsystem on a ml350 G4 HP with 5 disks.
the following files are in the datastore:

xxx.local_1.vdmk
xxx.local.vmdk
xxx.local.nvram
xxx.local_000002.vmdk
vmware.log
xxx.local_1-000002.vmdk
vmware5.log
xxx.local.vmx
xxx.local-Snapshot4.vmsn
xxx.local.vmxf
xxx.local.vmsd
xxx.local-218d9a0d.vswp

Is there a possibility to get out of this.........???

Please help

How do I commit a redo log when VC doesn't show any snapshots are being used?

benny.hauk — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:52:06 GMT

So I have 2 production VMs that are actively utilizing redo logs (they are growing) and I need to commit the redo logs. However VC doesn't show their are any snapshots for either of those so I can't just go into "Manage Snapshots" and delete the snapshot.

I'm on regular ESX (not ESXi) so can someone tell me the command to run to commit these redo logs before my datastore fills up?

btw, that's how I got in this state in the first place (run away redo log filled up the datastore which crashed a VM host and when the host was power cycled, the 2 VMs who had an active redo log at the time still do, but VC isn't aware of it.

thanks!!

Benny Hauk, VCP4
Systems Admin
LifeWay Chrstian Resources

Unable to add host to vcenter across two sites

foxy1977 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:21:35 GMT

Hi there,

I am having a problem adding a 3.5 host to a vsphere vcenter server running over a VPN. I have a vcenter up and running with 3 hosts in a datacentre. I have a 3.5 host in our machine and I want vcenter to be able to manage it. I now have a VPN setup between the two sites and I can ping most local addresses from each sites.

The problem i am having is that i cannot ping the esx 3.5 host in our office from the datacentre. I can also not ping it from the office. From here I then tried to connect vshere client to the 3.5 host from both sites. I was able to connect within our office and manage the server. Unfortunately i cannot connect the client to the host from the datacentre. Is there a firewall setting only allow connections/pings from the same local network?

I tried to add the host to the vcenter server but i could not add it. I get an error saying 'cannot connect to the specified host (192.168.1.23) the host may not be available on the network'

All ports are open on the VPN connection between the sites.

Anyone any ideas or thoughts on what the issue may be?

thanks

ESX 3.5 cluster failure with SAN & Network connectivity loss, BMC error ?

George_B — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:10:18 GMT

Hi All,

I have just had a weird catastrophic failure of one of my hosts in my cluster and I have yet to be able to pinpoint what caused it and how to fix it. Any thoughts, comments or pointers appreciated.

In brief I have a two node ESX 3.5 U4 cluster with enterprise licensing (DRS, vMotion etc with vCentre) running on HP DL380 G5 servers. These are connected via QLogics PCIe iSCSI HBAs to a Nortel ERS 5500 switch and then an EqualLogic iSCSI cluster of a PS100E and a PS4000E with version 4.2.1 firmware.

This is used to provide numerous high value but low load development and demonstration virtual machines. As of about 5 this evening one of the nodes just disconnected from VC along with all the VMs running on it. Before this no changes to configurations of switches, ESX or servers had taken place. What seemed to trigger this was the changing of some VM's NIC vSwitch connections.

Looking at all VMs running on the one remaining host seem to be OK but on closer inspection if you attempt to do anything that writes to the disk it fails, in a similar way if the their is an iSCSI time out due to a network failure. VC which is in a VM allows logins and functions but you cant use RDP to get to it or communicate with the VM in any other way.

There are also a number of errors on the physical consoles of the servers which also indicate a network connectivity failure. See screen grab below:

However the SAN is up, the network is only one switch and it is up, the VCB physical server thats connected to the same independent iSCSI SAN network can mount LUNs and happily write and read to them. This then isolates the network and SAN as possible faults.

One server responds only to Ping and SSH the other responds to Ping, SSH, VI Client direct connection and VC. As they both still respond in some way to their original IPs then there can't have been a vswif mis-config.

Logging in physically to both servers brings up similar errors relating to BMC. With a quick search of Google and the forums this seems like it might be an issue but why has it just happened without a re-boot or upgrade happening etc ? The KB article that seems to relate to this does not work and keeps asking for authorization.

So any help much appreciated !

ESX 3.5 and Storage

NeelR — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:53:03 GMT

Hi All,

We are currently thinking of using vRanger 4.0 DPP for our new backup. Is anyone using this?

Below is a rough drawing on how we have our enviro setup.

MGT Server - Windows pServer where we do all our work from.

San 2/3 - ESX Storage

San1/4 - For Backups (Fibre attached to MGT Server)

Green is all Fibre

Blue is Ethernet

Red line on the FC Switch is zoning. So 2 zones seperating the Sans.

So we want to install vRanger on our MGT server and then store the backups on San1/4. Is this possible? Even though the switch is Zoned?

Also if the ESX Server see's San1/4 but doesnt use them is this an issue? I remember having an MSA1000 attached to our MGT Server a while back, it was being 'seen' from ESX Servers and they began to have issues in the logs, however I cannot remember if there was any performance problems. Also, should the be seen if it is zoned? Do I need another FC Card to see San2/3 on our MGT Server?

Any help would be great.

Cheers,
Neel

Unable to create partition - NFS Server

kanoute696 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:23:22 GMT

I have a ESX3.5 host with a NFS server connected via VM Kernel. When I create a new virtual machine and run a iso image it constantly comes back saying that it cant create a partition on the datastore located NFS server. All the obvious permissions are fine. Has anybody seen this before?. Both servers are new builds.

Scheduled Task

max2479 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:17:25 GMT

Hello All,
Schedule task does not have the way of gracefully rebooting the VM. Shutdown will not work because I am not sure when VM will be shutdown so I can power it back on... reset is NOT gracefully shutdown. If I want to gracefully reboot the VM at scheduled time what are the options for me?

script only?
if yes, are there scripts that will schedule the time for the VM to reboot?

Unable to connect to MKS:Failed to connect to server x.x.x.x:902

Felix001 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:38:44 GMT

I currently have a Vsphere vCenter Server which is managing one ESX 3.5 server.
The problem is when I try to open the console to one of the virtual machines I get the following error :

Unable to connect to MKS:Failed to connect to server x.x.x.x:902

This seems to be due to my client trying to connect to the internal (actual) ip of the ESX 3.5 Server. Which does work as this address isnt NATT`d at the firewalls and set over the internet.

I have tried adding the vmauthd.server.alwaysProxy = "TRUE" setting but this hasnt worked...

Has anyone any ideas on how I can resolve this issue...???

Please note that I have no access to the firewalls or my local host file.

Hungs on RedHat VMs

afrontera — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:06:03 GMT

i am experiencing some hungs on RedHat VMs. The VMs appears to be on, but the service it provides get down (web applications fail, web servers down, any service that is running on this VM fails). It responds to ping and console on vcenter responds, but when you try to login on it, only left you to type the username and dont get reponse beyond that (ssh fails too). No fails detected on sistem logs. Diferent versions of RedHat an kernel:

distro	kernel	tools version
RH3 U2	2.4.21.15.ELsmp	169697
RH3 U2	2.4.21.15.ELsmp	169697
RH3 U2	2.4.21.15.ELsmp	158874
RH3 U2	2.4.21.15.ELsmp	No instaladas
RH5	2.6.18-164.6.1.el5	158874
RH5	2.6.18-164.6.1.el5	158874

Looks like a vmware problem with this releases and kernels. Anyone has experienced some similar like this?

Infrastructure:

ESX 3.5 U4 176894 (20 hosts)

Vcenter 2.5 U4 (planned to upgrade to U5 this week for HA issues)

FC SAN Storage

Thanks in advance!

ESXI 4.0 loss of network connectivity to VM's.

fusioncom — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:35:15 GMT

We are just starting in the Virtualization world so I'm having an issue tracking down this problem. I currently have ESXi 4.0 installed on a Dell PowerEdge with 32GB of Ram, Two NIC's, 750GB of DAS for the VM's.
I have built one VM that was operating just fine until recently. NIC#1 is dedicated to Management, NIC#2 is dedicated to the VM's. Right now the VM just randomly loses network connectivity, or stops responding. Then after a brief delay it will come back. There is no particular action causing this, and I'm not noticing a network connectivity problem in VSphere, it just drops the VM connection. RDP, PING, and the Console view in Vsphere cannot load the VM.

Any thoughts?

Perfomance chart probleme

Drygery — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:56:38 GMT

Virtual center 2.5

VI Client 2.5

ESX server 3i 3.5.0

I've a probleme with HA cluster with two ESXi 3.5 servers

I can't get normal perfomance chart from one of them

As you can see, the charts are broken. The second ESX is ok and the chart is normal.

The chart per VM is same;

The virtual machines are ok

What is the problem?

thanks, and sorry for my english

Host Error -- Unable to apply DRS resource settings on host (Reason: The operation is not allowed in the current state.).This can significantly reduce the effectiveness of DRS.

levinpeng — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:44:58 GMT

I have defined 3 root resource pools in my cluster. The total CPU resource is 60G and I set the Reservation for each root resource pool to 18G. The total memory resource is 80G and set the the momery reservation for each resource pool to 25G.
Recenty, some host often show error. I checked the events of the host and there are a lot items such as:
Unable to apply DRS resource settings on host (Reason: The operation is not allowed in the current state.).This can significantly reduce the effectiveness of DRS.
Unable to apply DRS resource settings on host (Reason: The operation is not allowed in the current state.).This can significantly reduce the effectiveness of DRS.
Unable to apply DRS resource settings on host (Reason: The operation is not allowed in the current state.).This can significantly reduce the effectiveness of DRS.
Unable to apply DRS resource settings on host (Reason: The operation is not allowed in the current state.).This can significantly reduce the effectiveness of DRS.
Unable to apply DRS resource settings on host (Reason: The operation is not allowed in the current state.).This can significantly reduce the effectiveness of DRS.

the details of the event doesn't have more information, so don't know what problem is.

I wonder if the configuration of the resource pools are incorrect. How should I do?

Service console memory monitoring

chukarma — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:04:55 GMT

Hello,

Is there a way to monitor the service console for memory leak using esxtop? If there is, can someone please shares the commands to get to that screen?

Thanks,
Daniel

Increasing vm disk space - problem

LinuxTux — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:56:47 GMT

I've used virtual centre to increase disk space on a new vm. I've got a problem because my redhat vm doesn't recognize this additional space.

I've tried to use gparted but it says it doesn't support lvm.

Does anyone know if there is a similar too to gparted that will support lvm?

VMs extremely slow after reboot. Also, boot order of VMs?

JoeyJoeJoe70 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:02:05 GMT

Recently had to power down and restart all of our ESX servers and the VMs on one of them are coming up extremely slowly and all tasks on the VMs are taking a very long time to complete. Even simple stuff like changing NIC settings or starting/restarting VMs takes up to ten minutes to complete.

The ESX server was shut down gracefully, so its not as if the plug was pulled or anything drastic like that.

Second, I have a virtual app that, pre-reboot of ESX, used to work fine, but since has started timing out on PXE boot and I get "operating system not found"

Java lockup/performance issues with ESXi 3.5, Ubuntu 8.04, Multi-CPU, and VMI Paravirtualization

mantico — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:00:38 GMT

We have discovered an interesting issue with a new production system we are setting up, whereby java processes on the VM guest are looping, consuming all available CPU. They are effectively locked up, and need to be killed (with -KILL).

Experimentation has demonstrated to us that this only occurs when the sites are running with VMI Paravirtualization turned ON, with multiple Virtual CPUs assigned to the guest - with paravirt on and 1 CPU, there is no problem. Turning paravirt off, and keeping 4 CPUs also corrects the problem.

We are running Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy) - 32-bit - with kernel 2.6.24-24-server. Tested JDK is jdk1.6.0_06, though we are about to check against the latest.

Has anyone else seen major problems with Paravirtualisation like this?

Layer 2 errors on VMs

Dave365 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:16:59 GMT

Hello all,

I recently noticed a number of guest VM's in my ESX 3.5 cluster have trasmit and receive errors on the ethernet interface.

The VM's I've checked so far are all x86 CentOS 5. They are using a mix of pcnet32 and vmxnet ethernet modules.

The hosts use teamed pNICs in the prodction vSwtiches, and none of the hosts have any interface errors at all. I didn't think it was possible to get errors of this type on a virtual machine, expecially if the hosts are error free.

The errors are occuring in a low numbers and aren't really affecting performance but I'd love to find out what is causing them. So any ideas would be great.

Sample ifconfig from VM:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:23:4d:70:50:6e
inet addr:192.168.1.11 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:857783612 errors:1637 dropped:1818 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:876028660 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:742182802 (742.1 MB) TX bytes:130439686 (130.4 MB)
Interrupt:17

Thanks guys

Roles and Responsibilites of ESX administrator

BSRKrishna — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 06:11:44 GMT

Hi 2 all,

I am not sure i can ask this question in this fourm...

Can any one share the L3 ESX administrator ROLES and Responsibilities ..

Thanks & Regards,
BSR Krishna

Is ESXi free?

Maayanay — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:47:34 GMT

i'm trying to figure out is ESXi 3.5/4.0 is really free?

do i need some sort of free license code? where do i get it? do i need different licesnse for every server? do i need t ask license for different amount of CPU?

i download ESXi 4 HP version and i want to start using it.i'm trying to get all the answers before implementing Virtual enviroment in the company I work for.

my machines are HP DL 380 G5 CPU Quadx2 with 8 GB RAM. and i know the server is supported.

on google i found some articles that says that ESXi is free and others says it is only for 60 days then you need a license!

Please help ASAP

Emulex HBA goes offline after utilization

pcdave — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:26:28 GMT

I have submitted a ticket about this, but was wondering if anyone else is seeing this.

Using ESXi build 199239 we have had 3 different Emulex LPe11000 HBAs go off line. The issue seems to inconstantly occur when we there is load on the host by copying large amounts of data to a VM located on the SAN

We have tested the communication through from the SAN to the FC switch and the fiber by attaching it to other servers and there seems to be no issue. The only way to get the HBA to come back online is to reboot the host.

The 3 changes that were made is that the servers were upgraded to build 199239 (that included a new Emulex driver); changing the virtual switches to connect to the physical switches with multiple NICs (though in one case only one NIC is enabled to each network); and we enabled multipathing on our SAN

We have been unable to consistently reproduce this problem, but 3 HBA errors in one week are concerning, especially when 2 of the hosts and HBAs have been working without issue for 6 months.

Thanks for any help you might have.
-Dave

Configuration on one of the servers exhibiting the problem

HP DL380 G6 BIOS P64 2009-03-28
ESXi installed on disk, build 199239
Dual L5520 CPUs
Emulex LPe11000: Boot Version: 5.03a0, Firmware Version: 2.72A2, Kernel Version: 1.20a4
HP Smart Array P410i RAID controller firmware1.66
Intel PRO/1000 Quad Port PCIe Gigabit Ethernet Controller

SAN: NetApp 3140v running DataOnTap 7.3.1.1P4
FC Switch: Cisco MDS 9124 NX-OS version 4.1(3a)

Please I need your help

Lotus91000 — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:34:47 GMT

Hi Here,

I think that I'm gone die because I started last week my IP Migration in Our ESX environment and the HA fails.
I have 4 Cluster. In the first Cluster, there are 6 ESX Servers and I just Changer the IP address of one of this ESX Host. I can ping everything:
1-The other ESX Server,
2-The Server Center
3-The other Servers.

I have tried many solutions:
1-Take out the Server and take it back in the Cluster:Nothing,
2-Reconfigure in VI the HA: Nothing,
3-I try this Solution where We have to edit the "Advance Option of the HA": Nothing,
4-I also find something on the Web wher ewe have the check the aam and F_Hosts file, I didn't see anything special.

I don't know what else I have to check.
Please your help will be appreciated.

esxcfg-rescan vmhba2 shows nothing?

peterlyttle — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:11:13 GMT

Hello,

Currently I have 7 servers (ESX3.5u4-199239) all facing the same problem, each server has 2x HP FC2142SR HBAs each connected to a switch which is inturn connected to each controller on my EVA4400 (4 paths total). From Command View I can see all the WWNs from the hosts that are presented to the vDisks so I can rule out any zoning/presentation issue.

Here are some outputs -

esxcfg-rescan vmhba1

Rescanning vmhba1 ...

On scsi2, removing: 0:1 0:2 0:3.
On scsi2, adding: 0:1 0:2 0:3.

esxcfg-rescan vmhba2

Rescanning vmhba2 ...
On scsi3, removing:.
On scsi3, adding:.

esxcfg-vmhbadevs

vmhba0:0:0 /dev/sda
vmhba1:0:1 /dev/sdb
vmhba1:0:2 /dev/sdc
vmhba1:0:3 /dev/sdd

We had been getting SCSI Reservation errors and the VMWare tech suggested rebooting all the hosts (which I did) but this didnt resolve the issue.

On reboot dmesg doesnt show any reservation errors nor does esxcfg-info | egrep -B5 "s Reserved|Pending"

Anyone have any ideas?

Reboot of MSA1500 resulting in lost datastore!

dennywu — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:32:33 GMT

After reading through several other discussions and researching my issue, I feel it is unique enough to warrant its own post.

Yesterday, we had to power down our HP MSA1500 in order to fix an issue regarding Selective Storage Presentation. The only things on the MSA are a few LUNs for backup purposes and a LUN for Disaster Recovery purposes. This LUN is presented to an ESX 3.5 server and is the one and only datastore, hosting about 15 or so virtual machines.

I went through and shut down all the VMs normally, and then powered down the MSA for about 10 seconds. Upon bringing it back online, everything was working fine except now I was getting the following error on my ESX server: THe VMware ESX Server does not have persistent storage."

I rescanned both vmhbas and I can clearly see the 1.36 TB MSA disk on each. However it is no longer a valid datastore and if I were to recreate it, it would format and wipe out all my VMs.

From my research on other threads, I tried the resignaturing fix and checking if the partition was lost. Looks like both are not the case, so now I'm at a loss for what to do. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Monitoring ESX via SNMP instead of the Web API?

RattusXanthurus — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:34:37 GMT

We have been using the check_esx3 Nagios plugin written by www.op5.com to monitor a bunch of ESX hosts. Occasionally they have been having problems with the service console running out of memory and VMWare thinks it is because of our monitoring. They suggested we switch over to monitoring via SNMP isntead of using the web API. However I can't seem to find any of the things we're monitoring via the API, in SNMP.

Can anyone help provide me with what SNMP OID's would give us this information? Or could someone confirm this info is only available via the API? I have done a full snmpwalk of the default MIBs as well as all of the VMWARE custom MIBs, but it just doesn't seem to contain all of this data.

Since SNMP doesn't seem to have all of this, maybe there are command line commands we could run instead on the service console that would be easier on it than the web API calls? If someone could tell me how to check all of these items via command line (vmware-vim-cmd etc) I could make some scripts to monitor all of that this way instead.

Here is what we are monitoring and graphing with Nagios, approximately once every 2-3 minutes per ESX host:

esx3_host_runtime_status:

esx3_host_runtime_issues:

esx3_host_runtime_con:

esx3_host_runtime_maint:

esx3_host_io_usage:

esx3_host_net_usage:

esx3_host_runtime_health:

esx3_host_nics:

esx3_host_cpu:

esx3_host_memory:

Failed to export virtual appliance: Unexpected meta section

gciano — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:32:15 GMT

I get this error when I try to export my VM as virtual appliance.

"Failed to export virtual appliance: Unexpected meta section"

Attached there is the vmx file. The VM has no snapshots and it has 2 virtual disks.

Thanks

ESXi 3.5 VM's have sluggish performance on Dell T7400 setup.

mlb7225 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:45:28 GMT

I am beginning the troubleshooting phase now of why my VM's are running very sluggish.

I am running ESXi 3.5 installed on a Dell T7400, dual quad-core CPU, 32gb ram. I have 2 arrays on the PERC6i controller, 2x 750gb RAID1 for my ISOs, and 3x 1TB RAID 5 for all my VM's. There are 2 physical NICs as well.

My VM's are eith XP or WIN2K. I have running at any given time about 5-7 VM's but there are a total of 19 VM's on this host. Each VM has about 2-3gb of RAM. The XP machines have 2 processors while the WIN2k have only 1 allocated.

The main problem I am having is with our Sieble compile of the .srf file. This process usually takes about 90 min, but now, it is taking well over 3 hours. I am not sure if there is an I/O issue with the RAID 5 on the PERC controller. The compile is doing a lot of writing on the drive. When I configured the PERC card, I kept the standard defaults, 64kb, No Read Ahead, and Force WB.

I was told before I installed ESXi 3.5 that it could handle about 12-16 VM's running on a single host. Is this true? If so, where did I go wrong?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Restart ESX Server 3.5 upt. 4 - DS4700 Logical Drive not on preferred path

rhaddad2009 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:56:43 GMT

I have a new DS4700 model 72. I have created some arrays for 2 hosts. I also have a Bladecentre H with a HS21 server with a quad port qlogic HBA. I have installed plain ESX 3.5 update 4 on this Blade and it has access by 2 arrays (array 1 prefered controller is set to A and the array 2 the preferred controller is set to B). After I restart the ESX an error light comes on. In Storage Manager the error is "Logical drive not on preferred path", and the LUNS are using the another controller. I spook whith the Storage Specialist and he told me this error is caused by a configuration about paths on VI.

Has anyone seen this ?
Regards,

Ralph Haddad

BMC Patrol is reporting link lost for ESX server 3.5

Chetanrchauhan — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:44:03 GMT

BMC Patrol is reporting link lost alert for ESX server even ESX server is up and running , Patrol agent is also running.

Patrol agent restarted not helped.

Please advise.

Anyone ever use WinPE to align partitions?

jfierberg — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:28:33 GMT

I have multiple vms that are rebuilt daily using Altris DS and I want to preserve their MBR alignment since they are stored on NetApp NFS volumes. Has anyone figured out how to do this through WinPE?

License Compliance Scripting

JimO1biPro — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:59:51 GMT

I need to create scripts for windows and linux guests that, if possible, interrogate the machine configuration for software that has been licensed on a per CPU basis.

Is there anything within the guest utilities that would allow interrogation of vm environment settings like sched.cpu.max and min?

VM disk crash after increasing disk size

mrweetman — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:29:16 GMT

Hi,

Recently we have had some problemes when we increase the disk size on VM's running Windows 2008 server.

It happens when we increase the disks on a running VM and then use diskpart or disk management to increase the NTFS size..

Has anyone experienced anything similar?

The datastore has a minimum of 50GB of free space so I do not belive this to be the problem. The datastores on the host consists of LUN's from a symmetrix SAN.
We run ESX3.5 update 4

Regards

Marius Aulie

Deleted Guest and lost all files but vmdk files

aefx — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:35:46 GMT

Through a series of unfortunate events I've lost all the config files for a guest. The only files I have left are two vmdk files, a flat file and a delta. I've created a new virtual machine with the intention of attaching the disks left behind but I'm unsure of what to do about the delta file. The only way I know how to commit via the service console is using the vmx. Any recommendations on what I can do?

Licensing Question.

DavidMcKnight — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:39:13 GMT

Can someone help me figure out what I have and where I can go with my VMware products?

I purchased Academic VMware View 3 Premier Bundle: Starter Kit with a support contract some 6 months ago. As I understand it, it came with 2 processors of ESX, 1 install of VMware vCenter Server, and 1 install of VMware View Manager 3.0. I have not been able to install ESX4/VSphere since VMware has not given me upgraded license codes. I guess they've been waiting for View 4. So with View 4 just now being released, should I now be expecting updated license codes for the lastest version of VSphere/View Manager 4.0/vCenter? If I am suppose to get updated license codes does anyone know how long it will take to get them and how will I know they're waiting for me?

Thanks

ESX Server hang when moving a virtual machine between two ESX Servers

quan0509 — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:17:15 GMT

Dear all.

I've just meet a probem with two ESX 3.5 Server System. So i'll describle all the things i'm facing right now.

In my system. I have 2 ESX Server 3.5 is managed by VMWare Center 2.5 with all advanced feature. So cause the less budget, each ESX server has only NIC Card ( i plug the network card *Intel Pro
1000/GT Desktop Adapter)*

In the test reason, i tested vMotion feature with moving a vmware ( vmfs file 's stored in local storage ) from one to one. So when i was moving - the both of my ESX servers were hang. I can't access to them by all the possible ways .

I don't known what are my facing problem ..

Anyone can help me.

Tks for reading !

hba warnings on esx console screen and how to clear them.

digitaex — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:58:09 GMT

We currently had a issue on 1 of our esx servers that lost its connection to some SAN luns, some orange warnings are on the esx console default screen. The SAN issue was resolved and we verified all is fine in VCenter but the warrnings are still there. How do we clear the warning's on the console screen or this their still a ongoing issue to the LUNS that VCenter is not showing?

esx3.5u4 - does apche uses coldfusion?

mking28 — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:29:04 GMT

I am not sure if tomcat apche that comes with esx server 3.5u4 configured to use ColdFusion? If yes how can I tell the version level on ColdFusion?

Mine esx server showed "Adobe ColdFusion Multiple Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability" during Foudstone scan which seems more like a false positive.

Need help!

P2V Large Scale Enviroment...Document on Best Practices?

JazTek65 — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:32:42 GMT

Hi,

I am going to be part of big migration for a company. Looking for a document that describes best practices for large scale p2v migrations...

thanks,

Lance

Multiple VMs in datastore index......

adamhodgkins — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:00:44 GMT

Hi,

I've started to get a problem with backing up 2 VM's with Veeam Backup. I logged a support call with them, and in following their instructions I've noticed something weird that doesn't seem right.

I've logged into the ESX server via the web to get the 'Index of datastores for datacentre.....' page, then go into 'VM1 Datastore' and under there it gives me a list of the virtual machines that are on there. I have a list of over 10 servers that are fine, but there are 3 that i'm having problems with:

Company DC1
Company DC1_1
Company Data 1

I have no idea where the Company DC1_1 server has come from as there are only the DC1 and Data 1 servers shown in vCentre which should be correct. There's another issue with this in that the DC1_1 server and the Data 1 server have both been modified recently which is fine, but the DC1 server which should be the correct one, and is the one that is showing up in vCentre was modified months ago.........

Has anyone come across this before / know why this may be happening??

Thanks for your help!

Adam

Please Help Me Diagnose My ESX 3.5 Test Server - Clean Install / No Network Activity

FredWilliams — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:08:59 GMT

Hi,

Im in the process of testing ESXI 4 and ESX 3.5 (on the same test server)

This is a test server whitebox, I can use ESXI 4 without any issues, and can connect via the client with no issues (Everything works ok apart from on board storage not being detected, installed to USB)

The network card is an Intel Pro 1000 MT dual port PCI-card

When I install ESX 3.5 everythings installs ok, and it detects all my hard drives and NIC's.

When I try to logon with the set IP address I am unable to connect via client or web url or even ping the server (I have pinged 127.0.0.1 from the server and that seems to be the only thing that responds!)

Bearing in mind the network settings used are identical to the one used when testing ESXI4, so I dont think its anything to do with that, and the Network cards used are being detected during install.

Can someone please give me some advise on what would be the possible cause for this? I obviously would like to use 3.5 as it will save me a fortune buying a seperate storage card.

Thanks for any help.

Fred

error connecting to bin/vmx process.

pinkynarf — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:53:34 GMT

ESXi 3.5

I have 3 VM's on my server which began getting this message: error connecting to bin/vmx process.

The machines have been running fine for a year. We have gradually added more machines and are now up to 8 VM's. There is no rhyme or reason why this is happening to these 3 machines. 2 of them are XP Pro and one is MS Server 2003 Web Edition. I have to reboot the entire VMWare machine to get them restarted.

This has happened twice in as many weeks. I am really concerned about this. I need trouble-shooting steps, clues as to why this might be happening... anything at all so I don't lose my customers.

David

How to decrease the host I/O timeout - data recovery

markiusuk — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:40:49 GMT

Hi

I am currently in the process of trying to recover some data from a virtual machine and am looking for some advice to help speed the process up.

Background: ESX 3.5u4 host connected to a HP/Lefthand SAN storage array. It was all working beauttifully until one of the LUNs that contained a VMFS file system was shrunk on the storage array. The result of this action was that ESX thinks it has a 750GB VMFS partition on a 600GB LUN. Sadly vmfs-undelete has revealed that large portions of one of the VMDK files was occupying space past the 600GB point - this data is now lost.

What I'm presently trying to do is recover the data from files that were before the 600GB limit. I'm using Recovery Studio.

The recovery process is working and files that were before the 600GB limit are being recovered correctly. However, the process is very slow.

The reason that the process is so slow is that whenever rstudio attempts to read a file that has a portion that resides past the 600GB limit it takes exactly 40 seconds to fail.

Whenever the guest tries to read beyond the 600GB limit, I get a "StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0" message in the vmkernel log file. This translates to a target error of "Logical block address is out of range" which is umm... logical.

What I'm looking for is a way to decrease the I/O timeout values so that when rstudio tries to read data from past the 600GB limit, it fails within a couple of seconds.

Do I just need to change guest timeout values or is there something on the host that I can change to speed things up?

UPDATE

Here is an example from the vmkernel log file. I beleive it shows that ESX is doing 8 retries and waiting 5000ms between each retry. Does anyone know where these timings are configured?

~~root@esx2 ~~~# tail -n 15 /var/log/vmkernel
Nov 7 19:21:48 esx2 vmkernel: 1:08:41:05.417 cpu5:1029)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0
Nov 7 19:21:48 esx2 vmkernel: 1:08:41:05.518 cpu5:1029)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0 <= First read attempt
Nov 7 19:21:53 esx2 vmkernel: 1:08:41:10.509 cpu5:1029)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0 <= 1st retry, 5 seconds later
Nov 7 19:21:58 esx2 vmkernel: 1:08:41:15.510 cpu5:1029)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0
Nov 7 19:22:03 esx2 vmkernel: 1:08:41:20.509 cpu5:1029)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0
Nov 7 19:22:08 esx2 vmkernel: 1:08:41:25.510 cpu5:1029)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0
Nov 7 19:22:13 esx2 vmkernel: 1:08:41:30.509 cpu5:1029)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0
Nov 7 19:22:18 esx2 vmkernel: 1:08:41:35.512 cpu5:1029)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0
Nov 7 19:22:23 esx2 vmkernel: 1:08:41:40.509 cpu5:1029)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0
Nov 7 19:22:28 esx2 vmkernel: 1:08:41:45.510 cpu5:1029)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0 <= 8th retry, 40 seconds later. At this point the failure is passed up to the guest
Nov 7 19:22:28 esx2 vmkernel: 1:08:41:45.604 cpu5:1029)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0 <= Next read request from the guest ~100ms later
Nov 7 19:22:33 esx2 vmkernel: 1:08:41:50.606 cpu5:1029)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0 <= 1st retry etc....
Nov 7 19:22:38 esx2 vmkernel: 1:08:41:55.604 cpu5:1029)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0
Nov 7 19:22:43 esx2 vmkernel: 1:08:42:00.603 cpu5:1029)StorageMonitor: 196: vmhba32:10:0:0 status = 2/0 0x5 0x21 0x0

Another update

I've tried reducing the values for the config items below and rebooting the server but it's made no difference. I still get 8 retries with 5 second delay between each. Does it matter that it's iSCSI? Is there somewhere else I can look for the timeout settings?

Scsi.TimeoutTMThreadRetry
Scsi.SCSITimeout_ReabortTime
Scsi.TimeoutTMThreadMax
Disk.RetryUnitAttention
Disk.SchedQuantum

Anybody?

Mark

Non-functioning KMS (Server 2003) after P2V conversion

jawerjksdpgfjlmascouawf — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:50:20 GMT

I did a local-based conversion from on an old Dell 2450 to ESXi yesterday. Since the change in visible hardware is obviously significant enough and caused the KMS to spit out "KMS license expired or hardware out of tolerance" as a message whenever I do "slmgr.vbs -dlv," this required re-activation of the KMS via "slmgr.vbs -ato." However, now whenever I do "slmgr.vbs -dlv" it tells me that the status is "licensed" but there's no current client activation count. When I have Vista clients try to connect to the server, the clients get a message that KMS can't be reached. A packet trace clearly reveals that connection to TCP 1688 is made and that RPC transactions are taking place. There's apparently something wrong with the KMS.

Has anyone else had this issue? I really don't want to have to go through a KMS license key reinstall since I can't seem to locate ours.

Virtual and Physical DHCP Servers

scotty p — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:36:26 GMT

I have 2 domain controllers - DC1 (Physical) - DC2 (Virtual). I have a split scope for DHCP on them, however, leases are always grabbed from DC1 until it has filled up. Does this have anything to do with DC2 being virtual and possibly taking longer to respond to DHCP requests? This behavior just seems a little odd.

Thanks,
Scott

Replace NFS datastore with mirrored one (rename volume ID)

SawSaw — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:51:42 GMT

I have two separated host esx, one per site: for each one there are two NFS datastore, a vm connection broker and only one Virtual Center that serve both site.
There's the needs to replace two datastore from one host. Each datastore contain about 30 linked-clone VM.
I've mirror the two datastore and I have this situation:
NFS_001 -> xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx
NFS_002 -> qqqqqqqq-qqqqqqqq (VC)
NFS_001mir -> aaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaa
NFS_002mir -> bbbbbbbb-bbbbbbbb

To mantain unchanged the configuration of the infrastructure and the connectivity to the linked clone client, is it possible to umount NFS_001 and NFS_002 and replace both with the others mirrored renaming the ID of the volume? (like that)
NFS_001mir -> xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxx
NFS_002mir -> qqqqqqqq-qqqqqqq
I tried to mount all the datastore and I migrated a singol vm to the new datastore, but the linkedclone vm (5GB) becomes a standalone client (30GB).
How I can replace the two datastore without interfer with the actual configuration?
thanks,sw

Disk / vmdk partiton questions

John Johnston — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:45:05 GMT

We have a Windows 2003 VM on ESX 3.5, running SQL 2005. Currently the VM has 4 drives, running on 4 separate vmdk files, on a single LUN. Additionally, the VM has a drive using a RDM hosted on a different LUN from the vmdk files. This server was configured in this fashion, to facilitate backing up the disks for the OS, database store, logs, and SQL backup folders with the Vranger product, as well as the fact that is being replicated offsite using LiveWire. The RDM partition contains scanned images, and will grow rather large. We didn't want this partition included in our VM backups, snapshots, or replication.

We hold licensing for EMC Replication Manager, and are considering implementing SAN snapshots for this VM. EMC is advising me that the RM will snap the entire LUN which would require that we partition about 400GB for the initial snapshot. I'm not sure we want to give up this much space on the SAN, as the actual data on the server is less than 40 GB at this point. As an alternative, EMC advised me to put each vmdk on a separate LUN, so that we could limit the snapshots to the database and transaction log files only. I guess another option would be to leave only the VM OS disk on a vmdk, and set up RDM for the remaining disks, so that the RM would truly be able to snap the changes only.

I'm looking for some input as to best practice.

Thanks.

workstation 5 to esxi

ccie4481 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:32:15 GMT

Team,

I have a VM made in workstation 5. When i use converter to move it to esx3.5i im getting the error FAILED:unable to connect to the virtual disk. And in the log highlights it says ERROR: Failed to clone disk0 on the virtual machine.

Any ideas what im doing wrong?

Thx

Shaun

EVC issues with newer Dell blades

colodave — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:50:49 GMT

I am looking for some guidance on setting up EVC on 7 hosts.

Current setup is esx 3.5 update 4.

Host 1 Dell 2950 Xeon E5450

Host 2 Dell 2950 Xeon E5450

Host 3 Dell 2950 Xeon E5450

Host 4 Dell M600 blade E5430

Host 5 Dell M610 blade Xeon X5550

Host 6 Dell M610 blade Xeon X5550

Host 7 Dell M610 blade Xeon E5540

According to the evc/vmotion matrix i should have been able to select Intel Xeon 45nm Core 2 feature set. But i never get that far. I get incompatible hardware on Hosts 1-4.

I suggested to Dell tech support that the only way to get vmotion to work would be to create a second cluster and move hosts 5-7 into it. I would also have to create new iscsi luns for just the second cluster use only. Then migrating selected vms into the second cluster. At least this would give me vmotion on all the hosts even though hosts 1-4 and host 5-7 would be isolated.

Does this sound correct? I plan in the next year(s) to get 4 more blades that will be compatible with hosts 5-7.

Thanks in advance for any input.

dave

Windows Server 2008 Foundation edition on ESXi 4.0?

Disco Patrick — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:47:54 GMT

This is a question about ESXi 4.0, though in the absence of a board for it, I thought this board was the closest match.

Has anyone tried running Windows Server 2008 Foundation edition as a guest OS on ESXi? I've looked for it in the list of compatible OS's, but I can't find it there.

As almost every other version of Windows Server 2008 seems to be supported, is it safe to assume that it would be compatible?

ESX 3.5 u 4 is showing CVE-2009-1875 vulnerabity in foundstone

mking28 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:47:29 GMT

ESX 3.5 u 4 is showing CVE-2009-1875 Adobe ColdFusion Multiple Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability

CVE-2009-1875 is the Vul. with ColdFusion v8.0.1 and earlier versions, and JRun 4.0. These vulnerabilities could lead to the potential compromise of user accounts or the affected system.

"An update for ColdFusion resolves a double-encoded null character vulnerability that could potentially lead to information disclosure (CVE-2009-1876). This update should only be applied to ColdFusion installations that are configured with Apache."

I am trying find out if it really applies to me (esx 3.5 with update 4). I would think that it has been fixed for the esx we are using.

rpm -qa or esxupdate query doesn't really tell me any thing about jrun and coldfusion. I would like to know if I have coldfusion (installation configured for Apache) and jrun.

HELP!!!!

Thanks!
MK

StorLock Files on IBM x Series

chuels — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:18:19 GMT

Hello together,

I posted the same questions into the IBM Developer Forum, but didn't get a reply by now - so my hope is, that someone might know it from here and can help me:

############################

I currently have several systems running VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 U2 (release 110268) based on the x3650 (7979) series.
Installed is IBM Director Version 5.20.3su2 and IBM Raid Manager Agent for Linux Version 9.

In the root there are several files called StorLock0NRM***** and one file called StorLock512, all these files have 0 Byte files. If searched the net and found the IBM Advisory 513574685 (http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=nas75d3587e6b10c0a318625754a0030035b) which says delete the files and restart the cimserver service. After doing that the files get re-created.
What I done so far was:
1. Delete files, stop cimserverd service and start service again - files re-created
2. Stop cimserverd service, delete files, start cimserverd service - files re-created
3. Stop cimserverd service, delete files, stop IBM Director service, start IBM Director service, start cimserverd service - files re-created.

Has anyone an idea what is causing these files to be created in the root and how I can prevent the re-creation?

Thanks for your reply

Carsten

Backed up VM stored on Datastore, Can it be retrieved/loaded on the server?

srgrace09 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:51:28 GMT

At my IT job, we are running VMWare ESX Server 3.5. We just moved from one data center to another, and made backups of all of our VMs and put them on the datastore we had setup (FreeNAS and SAN). We also used off-site backups. Anyways, we are needing to run one of our previous SQL Test VMs for QA purposes; however, this was stored on the datastore. We are trying to pull it off the datastore (the machine VI is running on does not have the room to host the VM backup to be converted) and load it on the ESX Server. We thought there was a way to load it straight from the datastore, but it doesn't look like that. Is there a way to load it from the datastore or does it need to be stored at an intermediate location? Any insight into making this process easier would be great!

After editing some files

Lotus91000 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:06:13 GMT

Hi,
After editing some files to change the IP address:
1. /etc/sysconfig/network-scripst/ifcfg-vswif0
2. /etc/sysconfig/network
3. /etc/hosts
4 /etc/vmware/esx.conf

I cannot have any more "vcwif0"

Any help

Stubborn vmNIC names

Kahonu84 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:20:25 GMT

Aloha - Over the last month, we've been swapping out our dual-port for quad-port cards. As expected, the vmNIC names went whacky. On our first three hosts, we were able to edit esx.conf and make everything right and consistant. However ESX4 (same hardware as ESX1 and 2) decided to be a little different. Except for the last two vmNICs, we were able to get everything the same as the other hosts. But the last two vmNICS insist on being vmNIC32 and 33. We edit the esx.conf and change the names as we want. Then we search the rest of the file for no more occurances of those names. We save and reboot the host. 32 and 33 return.

At this point, I don't know what to think. Any ideas out there??

Mahalo, Bill

kickstart ESX 4.0 uses different mac address

tdubb123 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:45:01 GMT

why is it that with kickstart ESX 4.0, initially it connects with the mac address of vmnic0. but afterwards, it looks like it generates a random 00:50: mac address. how do I force it to use only the physical mac address from vmnic0?

Upgrading from 3.0.0

Yunthor — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:47:05 GMT

Good morning,

I have ESX 3.0.0 right now and have looked on the patch page for how to get it to 3.0.3. I cannot find anything. When I search for how to upgrade 3.0.0, I see things like "It is easy. It is just a patch." Where can I obtain the patch to get to 3.0.3? Do I need to go 3.0.0>1>2>3 and apply all patches as I go?

Thanks.

Unable to create a Datastore on a local LUN

jammons — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:12:35 GMT

We are setting up a new lab environment, and we are using local disks to save $. We have two nodes in the cluster, and I successfully configured the first node and am running VMs on it now. The two nodes are both HP DL380 G5's and we have two drives dedicated to ESXi and we have 6 additional 300gb drives in a Raid5 set that we are going to use for our VMs. When I look at the Storage Adapters in VirtualCenter, under the Smart Array P400 controller, there are two targets. The first target on both nodes vmhba1:0:0, are the first two disks that are in a Raid1 configuration. The second target on both nodes is vmhba1:1:0 and it is a 1.36TB lun made up of the additional 6 disks.

With node 1 there was no problem creating a new datastore on the second target. On node 2, I follow the Add Storage Wizard but I see nothing in the "Select Disk/Lun" screen. It is like the second target doesn't exist, or is formatted in a way that VMWare can't recognize it. These are brand-new 300gb disks, so I don't know why node 1 would behave differently than node 2.

Any idea how to address this?

Patching issue with VMSA-2009-0015

stratolynne — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:21:25 GMT

Hi all,

I'm working on the VMSA-2009-0015 patch and have the following problem:

I have 6 ESX 3.5-2 hosts. Patch ESX350-200910401-SG is on all on them ESX350-200901401-SG is only on 4 of them.

I ran Update Manager to try to get this patch installed yet it doesn't show up as compliant, unknown or non-compliant.

Anyone else seeing this problem of missing patches? And have an ideas how to resolve it?

Thanks!

Virtual Machine config file does not exist

sdigio — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:57:35 GMT

Hi all,

We have 3 Esx 3.5 Up3.

One of them sametime shows the error: "Virtual Machine config file does not exist" , when trying to open console for a VM.

This same error block also the execution of nightly backups for that VM. (VRanger Pro from Vizioncore).

Two others Esx servers never showed this error. I got this error three times since August 2009.

Yesterday I got the error, I tried to reboot the Esx server:

I got the VM "unaccessible" after reboot

I created a now host connection (re-register VM) and pointing vmdk file to disk and I got VM running agin.

I thought of a possible hardware disk problem.

I am very very scary about this situation, did some of you experienced the same problem ?

any ideas ?

Tks a lot for your help,

Stefano

slow response in virtual center

fvallet — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:44:02 GMT

Hello,

I have a physical Vcenter server managing 3 clusters, each clusters in a different site (site A, B and C). Vcenter is in site A. Network between sites is exactly the same.

My problem : all operations from Vcenter to cluster in site B take a lot of time to complete. By instance, power on a vm can take up to 5 minutes to reach 100%. It's not a problem with the host because the vm is up and running after few seconds, I can ping it and connect to TS session.

Operations from Vcenter to cluster in site A or C is fast, about 10sec to complete.

I was thinking about a network problem but cannot find anything. Do you have any idea?

Thanks,

Datastore has gone with the wind !!!

dipeshmehta — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:22:17 GMT

Hello all,

I have been using ESXi 3.5 hypervisor, with at present just one virtual machine setup. To make some space into the rack, I powered off the VM, and then shutdown the ESXi, took server to new rack, and powered on.......... and alas!!! there was no Datastore there... the ESXi reports that there is no persistent storage available, create new.

Please help me retriving the same.

Thanks in advance.

Dipesh

Script to find RDMs

hi1280 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:39:17 GMT

This is my 1st offical communities post. Hopefully I'm following all the rules. I've followed both community posts that copied below. The rdm.sh posted by lamw (also attached below) at http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/ is not producing accurate results for me. It does report back some of my RDM's, but not all. If it's something I'm doing wrong please don't fault lamw, it could just be my environment, please test his script as it did return some results for me. Has anyone (other then a 3rd party app) found a way to script an accurate report on all RDM's? Again below are the links that led me to the rdm.sh script. I'm running ESX 3.5 U4 on a 10 node ESX cluster over FC.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/131228

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10188

Memory consumed vs. Memory active

chukarma — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:31:36 GMT

Can someone help me understand this? I have a vm showing Memory consumed as 99% while the Memory Active is only at 11%. While this is going on, the pages are swapping.

Thanks,
Daniel

Converting a 2-node physical SQL cluster to a single VM

Brian Laws — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:51:47 GMT

I've got several SQL 2000 and SQL 2005 database clusters that I want to virtualize. Although I don't want them to be clustered anymore. I understand that there's still reason to do clustering in VMs, but we don't need it. The high availability provided by HA is good enough for us.

I have two primary requirements: capture all the configurations and objects in the active node (NTFS permissions, shares, applications, etc) and eliminate the need for SQL Enterprise Edition. It's the first requirement which makes it look like I need to convert the active cluster node. I can't guarantee that I can re-install everything; the risk is high. If I can get the active node virtual, then I can uninstall SQL, re-install Standard Edition, and restore the databases.

The trick, though, is in getting the active node virtual. Do any of you know of a good way to do that? Is there any software that could help? I very much want to avoid a re-install if I can help it. Thanks!!

ESX Servers using 10GB Nic

dbeatty1954 — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:45:13 GMT

Trying to configure an ESX server to use a 10Gb nic in trunking mode to access the network. I am not a VM person, but was hoping someone can give me some tips on how to configure the server to use the one 10Gb trunk for everything except the VMotion connect. Trunking from the network (Cisco) side looks to be straight forward, but any information will be appreciated. I am more confused by the server side. Thanks for any info.

Storage VMotions vs. Cold Migration

Germano — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:35:58 GMT

Hi,

I need to move a production VM (DB Server) to a new storage array and even though I'd love to use Storage VMotion, I think I will run into problems because one of the datstores being used has very little space left so I'm afraid I will run into space issues once storage vmotion starts using snapshots. For this reason I think I need to instead use a Cold Migration when time allows me to shutdown thisserver (weekend work), my only question is do I need any extra space on the source datastore to perform a cold migration?

Thanks
Germano

Problem with Acronis backup

javrob — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:24:40 GMT

I have in schdule acronis backup to several VM. I got the following error in a VM's backup. I didn't get the error when i do the backup to physical machines. The error is: 


Error 11/1/2009
6:00:15 PM Failed to backup file or
folder 'C:\Documents and Settings\acronisagent\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\Windows\UsrClass.dat'.

Error opening the file. (0x40007)

function =
"CreateFileW",

filename =
"[\\?\C:\Documents
and Settings\acronisagent\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\Windows\UsrClass.dat|file://///%3f/C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/acronisagent/Local%20Settings/Application%20Data/Microsoft/Windows/UsrClass.dat]"

Tag =
0xA8A1022BD18AE037

The process cannot access the file because it is being
used by another process (0xFFF0)

code =
80070020)

Tag =
0xBD28FDBD64EDB8AF: Retry/Ignore/Cancel

Do you have any ideas?

Thank you for your help!

Licensing Issue

MrBrettW — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:30:23 GMT

Hello,

I have two ESX 3.5 servers that are configured with HA and attached to a Dell SAN. I rebooted the servers last night for maintenance, and upon coming back up, one server says it is only licensed for 1 CPU, while the other is for 2 CPUs, which is what both should be. Both servers are pointing at my licensing server by IP address, so I am wondering why they are coming up differently. Before the reboot, both were licensed for 2 CPUs. Thanks for your help!

Multicast NLB

cdickerson — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:59:04 GMT

So I have a customer that whenever we reboot one of his ESX servers, NLB stops working. As long as all ESX servers are up multicast NLB works fine. I am using Cisco switches and I have verified my setup per the KB articles. The only thing I am doing a little different I think is that the vSwitch my VM's are using are trunk ports. Any ideas?

Thanks

-Craig

Problem converting vmware server 2.x machine to esx 3.5i

deeztech69 — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:34:45 GMT

Hello,

I'm having a problem converting a vmware server 2.x guest to ESX 3.5i. I'm using vmware vcenter converter standalone version 4.0.1 build-161434 for Windows. The vmware guests are on a USB hard drive attached to the converter machine which is running windows xp professional. The ESX 3.5i server is running on an 8 GB usb thumb drive and the vmware storage is configured as an nfs share from a linux server. In the vmware converter I go through the wizard and I start the conversion wizard and the conversion starts but eventually is fails with the following error:

FAILED: Unable to connect to the virtual disk.

This is the second time. Fist time it failed at 86% completed and the second time at 29% completed.

I would appreciate any help on this issue.

ESX 3.5 host with Cisco EtherChannel NIC aggregate

SamMcG — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:49:51 GMT

We have two identical ESX 3.5 hosts, both HP ProLiant DL380 G5s. Each host has 4 NICs, an Intel 82571EB which provides 2 gigabit connections, and 2 gigabit connections on a Broadcom BCM5708. Each host is connected to the core switch, a pair of Cisco Catalyst 3750G switches which are clustered. Each host has 2 NICs connected to each switch in the core.

The switches are configured to aggregate the links as a trunk, ESX is configured for NIC teaming as the attached image - and it works perfectly on one host.

On the second host when we try and bring up more than one NIC into the aggregate we lose connectivity to the server. From the Cisco side, we see the ports come up - "show EtherChannel port-channel" and "show EtherChannel summary" both show the connections successfully configured.

No matter what we try, adding more than one link into the aggregate simply disconnects the host. The more confusing aspect is that it works perfectly with the other host, which has identical hardware, software and configuration.

Does anyone have any ideas? A NIC failure seems unlikely as we've tried using 2 ports from just one physical NIC (i.e. Broadcom or Intel) and we can't aggregate. For the same reason, plus the fact that the other host is identical, driver issues seem unlikely. An issue with the switch seems unlikely too, as the first host works, and the second host is using the same config. And it's very unlikely that all 4 ports that particular host uses are ALL knackered, ruling that out.

The relevant portions of the switch config are as follows:

port-channel load-balance src-dst-ip

spanning-tree mode pvst

spanning-tree extend system-id

interface Port-channel21

description ESX02 Trunk

switchport access vlan 8

switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q

switchport trunk native vlan 8

switchport trunk allowed vlan 8

switchport mode trunk

switchport nonegotiate

spanning-tree portfast trunk

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/13

description ESX02 vNIC0

switchport access vlan 8

switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q

switchport trunk native vlan 8

switchport trunk allowed vlan 8

switchport mode trunk

switchport nonegotiate

shutdown

speed 1000

duplex full

channel-group 21 mode on

spanning-tree portfast trunk

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/14

description ESX02 vNIC2

switchport access vlan 8

switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q

switchport trunk native vlan 8

switchport trunk allowed vlan 8

switchport mode trunk

switchport nonegotiate

shutdown

speed 1000

duplex full

channel-group 21 mode on

spanning-tree portfast trunk

interface GigabitEthernet2/0/13

description ESX02 vNIC1

switchport access vlan 8

switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q

switchport trunk native vlan 8

switchport trunk allowed vlan 8

switchport mode trunk

switchport nonegotiate

speed 1000

duplex full

channel-group 21 mode on

spanning-tree portfast trunk

interface GigabitEthernet2/0/14

description ESX02 vNIC3

switchport access vlan 8

switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q

switchport trunk native vlan 8

switchport trunk allowed vlan 8

switchport mode trunk

switchport nonegotiate

shutdown

speed 1000

duplex full

channel-group 21 mode on

spanning-tree portfast trunk

ESXi 4.0 VMs go to STOP and Kernel Panic periodically..

eyatsko — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:44:50 GMT

Dear colleagues!

I can't find according topic, I can't submit a request (or I simply don't know how). But I can't ask help something else (I exhausted all my sources where I could find a help).

I try to tell in order:

I download ESXi 4.0 for Home use purposes;
I registered Serial Number (440CK-6E015-18V31-02086-90970);
I installed three VM on ESXi 4.0. Here they are:

a) FreeBSD 7.0 x64;
b) Ubuntu 9.04 x64;
c) WIndows 2003 R2 x64.
And now I have the following situation:
- FreeBSD has "Kernel Panic" every week;
- Ubuntu has no Kernel Panic after I remove iSCSI functionality from it;
- WIndows has Blue Screen with different STOP codes each time every two or three days!
I don't know where I can ask for assistance, so I ask you as only accessible form to submitting an issue. May you redirect me to correct department in vmware.com? What additional information do you need to tell me something useful? I have no ideas what to do! I want to say that all my home infrastructure is palsied! It's very urgent! Please help!

Kind regards,
Ellad Yatsko

ESXi 3.5u4 Dell Customized upgrade to 4.0i Dell Customized

Box293 — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:35:02 GMT

Last year I deployed ESXi 3.5u4 Dell Customized version on a clients server.

I want to now upgrade it to ESXi 4.0 Dell Customized. Is this just as simple as performing the upgrade as per the normal methods?

Are there any special release notes for the Dell Customized ISO?

Thanks
Troy

VCP3 32846
VSP4 VML-306798

Error: No NIC found with the name eth0 kickstart

tdubb123 — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:28:33 GMT

I am trying to kickstart install ESX4 but it giving an error saying

There was a problem with the Network Device specified on the command line.

Error: No NIC found with the name eth0

The same script works with ESX 3.5 install. Any idea?

Almost up and running.

DevLano — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:09:36 GMT

Hello all.

I am attempting to install esx 3.5 update 4, onto a dell inspiron 530, 32 bit.
have read that I am in the clear and this has been done before with success, hardware wise.
I have checked the compatibility list and I have a double OK:

I have tried to start esx under a workstation 6.0.
was able to roll back my nic drivers to pass my first obstacle of no network found, but failed at connecting to the storage.devices.
at that point I moved towards a real installation. was using red hat linux to boot on. would like a possible answer to this, but not my priority.

I have esx installed on a spare 80 gig sata drive. I tried to boot from a usb drive, but got a standard boot error.
again, I would LIKE to boot from the usb drive and save the 74gb's for who knows what,
if there would be a quick solution to this, but again not my priority.

during the install process I did this:
ESXi install to IDE drive
to get my sata drives noticed by esx. success.

but when I complete the installation, I arrive with this problem:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/190192 will describes it to the T.

now I understand that just because I was able to roll back my drivers during my VM testing that this would not be a valid method in my current scenario,
BUT, I had heard rumor that maybe, in update 4, better support was added to handle my internal on-board nic.

most of the dell inspiron 530 case studies ended with, buy the Intel Pro100/1000
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106121
and it just works. I get that. and would like to save that as a trump card if there is no other option available to me.

but I wanted to make sure that I wasn't just facing a small edit like I had to do with the sata installation, using the admin/vi console.
and/or possibly a networking issue on my end with my router applying DHCP and not issuing an IP to esx, etc.

I do have a static IP available to me. but I assumed I would forward those setting via my router. not really sure?
when I have esx running, it reads back 0.0.0.0 <static> and does not show up as a connected device with an internal address.
and I did not see any configuration during the esx install, as I did during the vm testing I did on red hat. so I'm at a lose for the config.

I have a newegg cart list ready to go, but wanted to see if possible I could get this up and running today-tomorrow-ish.
via a hack and slash method. instead of waiting a week for a new part that will 95% work for me?
or should I be using an updated version of esx, like 4.0 or esxi? from my understanding it was all 64 bit ONLY, after 3.5.
let me know if I'm wrong there.:)

Thanks,
Dev.

ESXi 4.0 - Won't Load Windows 2003 R2 64Bit

Domwilko — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:34:34 GMT

As a resonable newbie, I hope I'm just making stupid mistake here.

I've successfully installed ESXi 4.0 on a Dell Poweredge 2850 server with Dual Intel Xeon 3.60Ghz processors, 4GB RAM and 3 logical drives (72GB, 36GB & 36GB).

Following the ESXi installation I was able to successfully install a Windows XP Professional VM.

I then wanted to install a Windows 2003 R2 64-Bit server.

The host server, the Dell 2850, is 64-Bit compatible (it must be as it loaded ESXi 4.0); however when I try and install the Windows server, it reports:

Message from localhost.******.*****:
This host does not support VT. You have configured
this virtual machine to use a 64-bit guest
operating system. However, this host is not
capable of running 64-bit virtual machines or
this virtual machine has 64-bit support
disabled. For more detailed information, see
http://www.vmware.com/info?id=152
info
31/10/2009 16:53:57
root

Is this because I'm using the evaluation version of ESXi 4.0 and therefore the 64-Bit support of VMs is disabled? I've tried searching on the VMware website for answers and have become very frustrated going round in circles without getting any answers, hence I've ended up here.

Hopefully someone can answer this question.

Thanks.

Win Srv 2008 R2 support

DAbowitt — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:59:16 GMT

I setup a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM and had an issue with a couple of screens freezing such as the security configuration wizard.

Opened case with VMWARE and was told the Srv 2008 R2 is not officially supported yet and will be in a future patch fix to ESX 3.5.

Anyone can tell me when this will be supported as I want to roll out a migration from 2003 Domain Controller to Srv 2008 R2 DC's. Don't want to spend money on consultating to go to Srv 2008 SP2 and then have to spend again on R2 migration.

Also, anyone else try deployment of R2 and had success.

My config is 1VCPU, 4GB RAM, Enhanced VMXNET adaptor.

Thanks,

David Abowitt, VCP

Emulex LPe1105 Firmware version

Alethay — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:04:42 GMT

Hi everybody,

on my HP DL380 G5 with esx 3.5 U4, i've installed version 7.4.40 instead 7.4.13.

Is this cause a problem?

Where i can download the correct firmware version ? I can't find on hp website!

Thanks in advance

Ale

lpfc0 0111 ELe Dropping received ELS cmd Data: x2 x0 & lpfc0 0127 ELe ELS timeout Data: x3 x93d x8c x93f etc in vmkernel log

Jonathan Storey — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:28:48 GMT

Afternoon,

Just looking through my vmkernel logs (it's a long friday afternoon) and noticed these eventc cropping up quite often. Are they something to be concerned about? According to http://www-dl.emulex.com/support/vmware/734/vmware.pdf they relate to the following:

elx_mes0111: Dropping received ELS cmd

DESCRIPTION: The driver decided to drop an ELS Response ring entry.

DATA: (1) ulpStatus (2) ulpWord[4]

SEVERITY: Error

LOG: Always

ACTION: This error could indicate a software driver or firmware problem. If problems persist report these errors to Technical Support.

and

elx_mes0127: ELS timeout

DESCRIPTION: An ELS IOCB command was posted to a ring and did not complete within ULP timeout

seconds.

DATA: (1) elscmd (2) did (3) ulpcommand (4) iotag

SEVERITY: Error

LOG: Always

ACTION: If no ELS command is going through the adapter, reboot the system; If problem persists, contact Technical Support

System Details as follows:

HP bl685 g5 with Emulex LPe1105-HP 4Gb FC HBA for HP connecting to Cisco MDS 9124e 12-port Fabric Switch then on to IBM DS 4300 Dual fabric san and IBM SVC presentation.

running esx 3.5 build no. 199239

Anything to be concerned about? Can anyone shed any light on why these events occur?

Many Thanks,

Jonathan

VI Client losing connection

Clients — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:59:05 GMT

I am using the "VMWare Infrastructure Client" to manage several esx 3.5 servers. I am losing connection to one of them and when I try to reconnect I get the errors "VMware Infrastructure Client could not establish the initial connection with server 'XXX'. Details: A connection failure occured" and "Details: The server took too long to respond"

The esx server replies to pings, I can log on to the console and ping the gateway as well as an IP on the internet. The Guest Os's are still running and I can RDP to them. I just lost management control/connection of the esx server.

Short of restarting the server (which doesn't fix the issue, a full rebuild of update 4 and patching also failed to fix the issue), what can I do to fix this?

Thanks,
Jonathan

Lun Ids

f_wendel — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:51:39 GMT

Hello

Is there a way in ESX 2.5.x to see the Lun Ids from the console?

Thanks and regards

Federico

SRM and EMC DMX-4 950

neo_italy — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:21:30 GMT

Hi all,

scenario:

DMX-4 on prymary site. DMX-4 on secondary site

one lun (R1) replicated via srdf(to R2)

- group created and assigned a BCV for the test on the replicated lun

- mapped R2 and BCV to the hosts of secondary site

There is a differnce in our implementation from the symmetryx guide with srm, we have installed the symapi srver on the srm server that access directly the storage, but the esx luns are not even mapped to srm server, is right?

When i try a test i get the following error:

--2009-10-29 10:21:28.301 'SecondarySanProvider' 2832 verbose-- Adding mount path '/vmfs/volumes/4addb18a-084d4d28-73a6-001a64dcf548/' for datastore 'datastore-191' on host 'host-26'
--2009-10-29 10:21:28.301 'SecondarySanProvider' 2832 verbose-- Adding mount path '/vmfs/volumes/4ab102d0-14838020-9f2f-001a64dcf28a/' for datastore 'datastore-29' on host 'host-26'
--2009-10-29 10:21:28.301 'SecondarySanProvider' 2832 verbose-- Adding mount path '/vmfs/volumes/4ae95e06-c3994fc6-9650-001a64dcf288/' for datastore 'datastore-381' on host 'host-26'
--2009-10-29 10:21:28.317 'SecondarySanProvider' 2832 trivia-- 'Prepare VM 'shadow-vm-5182' for test' took 0 seconds
--2009-10-29 10:21:28.317 'SecondarySanProvider' 2832 warning-- Failed to prepare shadow vm for recovery: (dr.san.fault.RecoveredDatastoreNotFound)

Here it is another piece of the error:

2009-10-29 10:21:28.286 'SecondarySanProvider' 2832 warning Shadow datastore for datastore 'sanfs://vmfs_uuid:4ae70694-5ce765e3-9ce0-001a64dcf0a8/' not found

and test stops with failure

What is the shadow datastore?

Thanks all

memory dump converter for VMware ?

urworld — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:25:07 GMT

Hi all,

I'm a platforms support engineer and one of the challenges we run into in PSS can be getting memory dumps. While we often have customers use Control-Scroll Lock-Scroll Lock, that isn't always a viable option for a number of scenario. As customers virtualize servers, our alternatives become limited (dumping over firewire, NMI, etc are not options).

Something VMWare has, which works well for us, is a saved-state converter. Essentially, they have the customer pause the VM when it is in the problem state and then upload the memory image to VMWare. They then have a utility which can convert this to a .DMP file which WinDBG can open.

Do we have any tools/any plans to create the tools which allow us to convert memory dumps in the same manner? Or perhaps a WinDbg plugin which can open the files directly? If not, are the specs of the HyperV saved states available somewhere so I can investigate writing a tool that does this? Thanks!

(hpmgmt) hp-OpenIPMI will not uninstall

sgstuart — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:53:58 GMT

Hi All,

I am hitting my head against the wall way too long now, and I am asking for help. 1 and only 1 of our many ESX boxes is having this problem. It (they all are) a 3.5.0 update 4 server. I have not been able to install hpmgmt 8.2, because it says there are some already installed. rpm and --uninstalls show that there are 2 installed a 7.8 version and a 7.9 version. When trying to uninstall using rpm -e hp-OpenIPMI-7.9.0-110.vmware30 it says that

Upgrades are not permitted for the hp-OpenIPMI package.

Please remove the package using the command: rpm -e hp-OpenIPMI

error: %prerun(hp-OpenIPMI-7.9.0-110.vmware30) scriptlet failed, exit status 1

when I run rpm -e hp-OpenIPMI by it self it has the same 3 lines after this 1 line error: "hp-OpenIPMI" specifies multiple packages so it is stuck in a recursive logic (at least not programatically )

I have stopped pegasus and I do not have an hpasm to stop. I have not found anything else helpful.

Thanks,
Steven Stuart

VCB Unable to mount one drive

KelvinBailey — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:37:03 GMT

We have an (otherwise) fully working VCB set up. We can and do take fullvm backups of every VM each night.

We have an issue though with one VM where we need to mount the drive and only back up certain folders. The VM has three drives. The first two mount ok, the third says "fstype=(Unknown)" and is inaccessible. All three are regular NTFS basic volumes.

The only thing different about the third volume is the size - it's just under 2TB in size. It also has a LOT of small files (millions...)

You can see in the screenshot below it says volume 3 is not assigned a drive letter in the guest (but it is, drive e:)

Legato networker install error

dixon_mat — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:51:32 GMT

I get the following error on istall of networker... this is after I have installed the enabler 'VMware ESX 3.5 Enabler package for Legato Networker backup software'

~~root@dukldpae linux_x86~~# rpm -iv lgtoclnt-7.5.1-1.i686.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.3.4) is needed by lgtoclnt-7.5.1-1

Do I really need to update GLIBC ?... and if so how?

HELP!!! All VM´s had restarted, ESX seems to be ok...

cgornati — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:36:34 GMT

What could cause all VM´s to restart at the same time?

Is there a LOG where i can check what happened?

All 4 VM´s restarted, and doesnt want to go back to HA....

Thanks

SCCM OSD Deployment for Windows 2008 Guest

hantu33 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:10:00 GMT

Anyone had any luck with deploying Windows 2008 to a VM guest via SCCM OSD. I've created a VMtools driver package as part of the task sequence but it keeps failing on reboot with the 0x0000..7B BSOD. So I know it's an issues with the LSI storage driver. If I change the adapter from LSI to BUSLogic the vm boots fine. Any ideas why the LSI driver is not applying?

Read Performance ESX 3.5 Dell Perc 5/i

sidavid1 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:05:31 GMT

Hi,

I have an issue with one of my ESX Server, Read Performance issue on OLESX2.

My 2 configurations ESX Server:

OLESX1 Dell Poweredge 2900

VMWARE ESX3.5.0 build-199239 Kernel 2.4.21-58.ELvmnix (i686)

DISK Info

RAID 5
Name PERC 6/i Integrated
Firmware Version 6.0.2-0002
Driver Version 00.00.03.19
Type Read Policy: Read Ahead
Write Policy Stripe: Write Back

Controller PERC 6/i Integrated

Info Firmware Version 6.0.2-0002
Driver Version 00.00.03.19

NETWORK Info

Broadcom Corporation Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T
Intel Corporation Intel Corporation 82571EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller

OLESX2 Dell Poweredge 2900

VMWARE ESX3.5.0 build-199239 Kernel 2.4.21-58.ELvmnix (i686)

DISK Info

RAID
Name PERC 5/i Integrated
Firmware Version 5.2.2-0072
Driver Version 00.00.03.19
Type Read Policy: Read Ahead
Write Policy Stripe: Write Back

Controller PERC 5/i Integrated

Info Firmware Version 5.2.2-0072
Driver Version 00.00.03.19

NETWORK Info

Broadcom Corporation Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T
Intel Corporation Intel Corporation 82571EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller

===================================

My tests that I do to see that I have a read performance issue on OLESX2.

I use Veeam Backup, so I restored a 35GB VM, this is my info:
on OLESX1 is taking 9 minutes at 70MB/s
on OLESX2 is taking 9 minutes at 69MB/s

I do another restore test with a 26.02 GB VM
on OLESX1 is taking 4 minutes at 96MB/s
on OLESX2 is taking 5 minutes at 90MB/s

We can see that on write access the 2 servers have the same performance.

A test copy to copy between the 2 ESX servers
Copy 45GB VM from OLESX2 to OLESX1 is taking 23 minutes
Copy 45GB VM from OLESX1 to OLESX2 is taking 8 minutes

Copy 10GB VM from OLESX2 to OLESX1 is taking 4 minutes
Copy 10GB VM from OLESX1 to OLESX2 is taking 2 minutes

With this test, we can see that I have a read performance issue on OLESX2.

To copy the same VM is taking more than the double of time on OLESX2.

My third test and my last one, a backup test:

I backup a 45GB VM:
on OLESX1 is taking 13 minutes at 59MB/s
on OLESX2 is taking 33 minutes at 35MB/s

With my tests, you can see that we have a read performance on OLESX2.

Any help or idea will be appreciated? Thanks

David

Unable to hot extend virtual disk via COS?

pjgould — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:44:10 GMT

When I go to extend a running guest's virtual disk via the VIC (+Select VM > Edit Settings > Hardware tab > Highlight Hard Disk > change New Size to ##GB > Click OK+) the virtual disk file extends just fine. I can then go into the guest OS and extend the logical disk using a partitioning utility (diskpart, extpart etc). Works great.

Problem is, I have 300+ of these disks to extend and was hoping to script the process and do it via the COS. When I try to extend a running guest's virtual disk with the command 'vmkfstools -X ##G /vmfs/volumes/path to VM's disk/VMdisk.vmdk' I get the following error:

Failed to extend disk : Device or resource busy (1048585).

How is it that I'm able to hot extend a virtual disk via the GUI but not via the CLI? I've tried it from any of the hosts in the cluster and no dice. What is the GUI doing differently? Any suggestions?

Environment:

ESX 3.5U3, VC 2.5U3, plenty of space on the FC datastores that these machines reside on, the VM guest disks don't have snapshots and are in persistent mode.

Thanks, Peter

Replication VMware

sposada — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:19:18 GMT

Hello all,

I have 1 ESX booting from SAN and few ESX disk (Datasorte) with replication beetwen IBM DS8100, each disk its a only Datastore, when I have to go to Alternate environment, I need to poweron a VM in a Physicalmachine, but obviously doesnt work, How can I take control for that VM data in a Physycal machine?

Sorry for my english, Im from spanisho country