VMware Communities : Unanswered Threads - VI: VMware ESXi™ 3.5

Known good USB over IP Modem

Novensiles — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:28:42 GMT

We have a usb over ip device which is working properly for all devices except the dial-up fax modem. Apparently this is due to the modem being a winmodem requiring software processing. Can someone please post the exact model of a USB external modem known to work in ESXi using USB over IP?

VC shows Nics are down but can't be?

fajarpri — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:27:32 GMT

Hi all,

I've got ESX Server 3i 3.5 installed on IBM HS22 blade on Bladecenter E. The HS22 has 2 broadcom NetXtreeme II BCM5709 NICs. VC says that both NICs are down, but it can't be? Because I'm able to ping and in fact, I'm managing the host from VC, aren't I?

Is there just a GUI issue or I should be worried about it? Any work around?

Thank you.

ESX3i - Create Resource Pool on other server?

hstern03 — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:56:25 GMT

I have VC 2.5 and ESX3i in a DRS and HA cluster. Whenever i create a Resource Pool it always pulls data from one server, it never pulls it from the other server in the cluster.

So i have a total of 8gigs and 16ghz but when i try to allocate resources it only shows i have 4 gigs.

Any idea of how to fix this?

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?

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

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.

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

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?

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)

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.

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?

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 !

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

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.

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:)

Update service fails with one host, two host OK (could not manage error)

parcival39 — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:55:47 GMT

Hi all,
I have here three 3.5i host.
At two hosts, update service without problem works.
However with one host i get the following errors message.

"The VMware Infrastructure Update service could not manage one or more of the selected hosts.
Check that the service is supported on those hosts and that the hosts have network connectivity."

This problem gives it since short time.
The host with problems starts from an USB flash drive.
Possibly there are therefore the problems.
As i can determine whether the USB flash drive has enough RAM ?

thx

Stefan

Remote Command Line Interface

orcities — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:14:50 GMT

I have been trying to download products, namely RCLI, but all I get is "Invalid Download Group". Anyone ran into this before or know where I can download the RCLI?

CPU performance difference between HP BL460c Blade Servers

colin.graham — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:55:36 GMT

After a recent bout of firmware updates we started to experience some frusting performance issues when we vMotion a VM between a couple of HP BL460c Blade Servers running ESXi 3 (supposedly identical servers - same hardware & software configuration). Our issue is that a VM when running on ESX01 (good server) will run at say 10% CPU and when vMotioned to ESX02 this will increase to 20% CPU utilisation. If we then vMotion it back to ESX01 the CPU usage will drop back to 10%. Effectively ESX01 is carrying about 17 VMs while ESX can only carry about 9. Even though ESX01 is carrying more load and working harder VMs will perform better on this Server

The History goes something like this - we started with ESXi updates from Update 1 to the latest build (both servers, VCentre was also updated) and then while applying the firmware to one of the Blade Servers (ESX02) the System board got toasted and wouldn't respond. HP duly replaced the system board, we re-applied the firmware updates, updated BIOS settings to enable VT and carried on.

Virtual center version 2.5.0 Build 174768, ESXi version 3.5.0 Build 184236 (on both Servers)

HP BL460c G1 Blade Servers (dual QUAD core E5450 CPUs) are now both running rompaq 05/12/2009, iLO 1.79 and the OA in the enclosure is at 2.60. There is a later rompaq release but we wanted both servers to be identical. Firmware on all the components (on board NIC, Qlogic cards etc) is at the same level on both servers. C3000 Blade Enclosure connecting to an HP EVA4400 SAN.

We have tried replacing the system board again, formatting the drives and re-installing a fresh copy of ESXi and then patching to the same level again. We have tried moving the Blade to a different slot in the enclosure (change of fibre switch connections). Same results.

Any ideas where to go from here? Anyone else had a similar problem?

Thanks, Colin

Upgrading Virtual Center from 2.5 U2 to 2.5 U4

djenn40 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:00:16 GMT

I'm trying to go from VC 2.5U2 to 2.5U4 and I'm running into errors. I'm trying this on a test pc that's connected to a test ESX 3.5 host. The database is local as well. When I try to upgrade to 2.5U4 I get an error message "Validation of License file against VC server edition failed". I've read elsewhere that people have had luck by uninstalling VC and then just installing 2.5U4 and choosing not to re-initialize the db; while in the lab I have no worries about doing this I'm a bit concerned about doing it in production. Is that the best way to go about it or am I missing something in the upgrade process?

Slow File Transfers Between Virtual Switches

michaelblitz — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:35:21 GMT

SEA IP 10.10.1.88
WWW FTP IP 192.168.20.20

DMZ Network is connected to my physical DMZ network
VM Network is connected ot my physical Internal network

When I transfer files between SEA and WWW FTP, I'm getting ~300KB/sec
If I move SEA to vSwitch1, I'm getting 30MB/secIf I move WW FTP to vSwitch0, I'm getting 30MB/sec

Using a computer on the physical network copying to vSwitch0 I get 30MB/sec
Using a computer on the physical network copying to vSwitch1 I get ~300KB/sec

So, it looks like anytime I try and copy across from my 10.10.1.xxx network to vSwitch1 it's very very slow. Any ideas? All VMWare tools have been installed.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Michael

Windows 2008 Restart Issue - ESXi 3.5

JOstro — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:05:41 GMT

I am currently running ESXi 3.5 Build 199239.

I have an issue with multiple Windows 2008 Enterprise SP2 - Exchange 2007 SP2 Clustered Mailbox Servers

When I perform a restart sometimes the vm powers off (well at least I think it does, no system activity, but VI client icon is still green), but doesnt restar.

Any ideas?

slow performance on dell t3400

lismanni — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 08:06:22 GMT

hello,

I've installed esxi3.5 u4 on dell t3400 (SAS disks and an additional Intel PRO/1000 T).

I have few VM running Centos 5.3 with Apache, PHP,mysql.

The first time I access a web page of a site hosted on one of those VM the load time is >20s.

After that the load time is 1-2s. After a while (>20m) if I access again the page the load time is again >20s.

Any help will be appreciated.

Thank you.

Daylight saving changes will crap VI Client Performance chart views (hopefully nothing else..)

tlindi — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 04:36:16 GMT

Here in Europe Daylight Saving Change occured today (clock back by 1h)

That produced neat looking chart on VI Client.

Just thougth that where that time back-leap is counted on ESXi/VIClient.

That might result some fancy statistics for someone

tlindi

network throughput issues and install iperf on ESX/VI3.5

ewanat — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:04:36 GMT

I'm having some network issues with our VI3.5 (update4) hosts. I tested the network throughput between VM's and VM's to physical machines and found out that there are differences at certain VM's.
Some VM's have a throughput (outgoing) of 70-80MB/s others have only half of it. The ones that have outgoing 70-80MB/s have incoming only 35MB/s.
Even when the VM's are on the same host, the same vSwitch and the same resource group and almost nothing is going on on the host.
The VMs and physical machines I have tested with are mainly Windows 2003 with SP2, but tested also with Windows XP.
I've tested the network throughput with the tool Jperf2.0.0 (Iperf).
I mainly tested with one parallel stream but noticed that with 3 or more stream I get a throughput at all machines of up to 95MB/s, of course that doesn't help when I don't use any multithreading network application that could take advantage of it.

The other thing I have noticed is that the VM's never use two physical NIC's they always use only one NIC.
I also like to test from the service console but I can't get Iperf to install (see attached log file).
As I checked for differences between the VM's (Windows 2003) with different network throughputs I saw that they have more/less options at the network card properties (see attached word doc file) and some have the Authentication tab and some don't.
Has someone seen similar issue? How can I get iperf to work on ESX or do you know another network throughput tool that works on ESX and Windows?

Enrico

General load questions for a Dell 2600 server

Brocksampson — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:59:15 GMT

Howdy:

Thanks in advance for taking a moment of your day to review my questions.

I have a Dell Poweredge 2600 with 1 CPU (2.3GHz) and 4 gig of RAM, local SCSI storage (10k drives) and multiple ISCSi that are currently unused.

I have one Fedora 11 guest (Fog Server) and 5 Win XP Pro guests.

When I turn any more than three of these guests at a time, they all slow down to nearly a halt. They become so slow that I often see "application has not responded" in so much time for this or that.

Now the images that I'm using are cut down to nearly nothing, I have gone through and made sure that there is nothing extra running on these machines. All the extra appearance features etc have been turned off to give me the fastest possible response. Yet I continue to see slow guest VMs.

Shouldn't I be able to get more than just three VMs running on this hardware?

Thanks for any and all help.

Consequences of having Com+ System Application Disabled

dchunt — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:22:23 GMT

I was trying to install the updated VMware Tools on a Win 2003 R2 server running on ESX 3.5 VMware and was running into the 'Error 1722' doing so. Looking at KB1007306, I found that the 'Com+ System Application' service was disabled so I enabled it and started it. I was then able to install the tools. After a reboot, I noticed that that same service was disabled again; apparently a result of a group policy that is being applied to the server.

My question is:

Does VMware need the 'Com+ System Application' service running for any reason OTHER than installing the tools? If it is disabled by default, will this cause other problems with the VM and its interaction with the VMware ESX host?

Thanks,

Dan

error while running VMKFSTOOLS command

Tanav — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:36:35 GMT

hi,

i am running the below vmkfstools command and getting the invalid handle error. can anybody suggest me on this.

~~root@nda-hclt-esx169 bin~~# vmkfstools -C vmfs3 -b 2m -S ra /vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba0:1:0
Creating vmfs3 file system on "vmhba0:1:0" with blockSize 2097152 and volume label "ra".
Usage: vmkfstools -C vmfs3 /vmfs/devices/disks/vmhbaW:X:Y:Z
Error: Invalid handle

thanks in advance

tanav

ESX server reports SCSI reservation conflict after a power failure

mshahamiri — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:03:27 GMT

Hi All,

I am using iSCSI enterprise target to create iSCSI luns. I have created three luns. I am using hardware hba (Qlogic QLA405x) to connect the ESX server (which is running 3.5 update 4) to the luns. I formated the lun with vmfs and put one virtual machine on each lun. Everything was working fine until the moment that we had a power failure. After the power failure, I cleared the static discovery list of hardware hba (remember if you are using hardware hba ESX server will add any target that it finds to the static discovery list) and disconnected its cable and then rescanned the hba. The reason that I did this is to unregistered the luns from the ESX server. Then I restored the hardware hba connectivity and rescanned it again. The ESX server logged in to all three targets but couldn't mount one the vmfs volume (lun 114). I rescanned twice (and more) but didn't help. Looking at the vmkernel log, I am getting SCSI reservation conflict on that targe. If you want to see the vmkernel messages look at the attached file. Also looking at the messages I am getting this error

kernel: Vendor: IET Model: VIRTUAL-DISK Rev: 0
kernel: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 04
kernel: scsi2 (0,1,114) : RESERVATION CONFLICT
kernel: VMWARE: Device that would have been attached as scsi disk sdd at scsi2, channel 0, id 1, lun 114
kernel: Has not been attached because this path could not complete a READ command eventhough a TUR worked.
kernel: result = 0x18 key = 0x0, asc = 0x0, ascq = 0x0
kernel: VMWARE: Device that would have been attached as scsi disk sdd at scsi2, channel 0, id 1, lun 114
kernel: Has not been attached because it is a duplicate path or on a passive path
kernel: scan_scsis starting finish
kernel: scan_scsis done with finish

Then I tried to reset the lun by using the vmkfstools command and that solved the problem. I am wondering if anybody can give me an explanation of why this problem happened and why only for that particular target. I tried to recreate the problem and it always happens for that particular target.

ESXi 3.5 inventory showing all guests as unknown (invalid)

NZSewell — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:22:11 GMT

Help!

My ESXi client is showing all my guest servers as unknown (invalid).

The servers are still running OK, and nothing has changed on the ESXi server, or on the guests.

What Can I do to bring them back to the inventory which is painless (relatively) and easy?

Browsing the datastores I can see all the relevant files for each server.

Thanks

Dave

ESX 3i Snapshot in process not cancelling

RichardP123 — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:16:17 GMT

Hi,

I have been looking at a 3rd party program for backing up our ESX 3i server, and started a backup the other day. The program creates a snapshot then copies those files to the destination directory.

What happened this time, is that it started to create a snapshot, but then it never completed it. I aborted it, and it then didn't abort, just sat there trying. I went into VMware Infrastructure client, and in the recent taks list, it says there is a snapshot of this VM in process. This hasn't gone away for what is, coming up to a day now. I have right clicked on the task in attempt to cancel it, but cancel is greyed out.

With rebooting the server aside, is there anything else I can try to stop this task/process? I know the program I used is a 3rd party program and not supported by VMware, I am only looking to stop this process at the moment, with the least amount of trouble.

Slightly off topic: How easy is it get the Ghetto script (the one someone has created for backing up ESX VMs) setup and running, and is this the best method of backing VM's on a ESX 3i server?

Thanks,

Poor network performance on VM running on ESXi 3.5

rriva — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:44:30 GMT

Hi all,

I'm experiencing poor networking performance on some VMs running on VMware ESXi 3.5 Update2 on top of an Intel S5000PAL system with two quad core X5410 and 8 GB ram.

I'm using only the two onboard NIC with or without VLAN tagging but nothing changes.

Right now I have one of the two NIC configured for the management network and for the production LAN with 3 VMs with no particular need in network traffic.

The second NIC is dedicated to DMZ, with 2 VMs with no need in network traffic.

The performance TAB on the ESXi host tell me that the average of network traffic is about 50 Kb/s and there was no utilization peak in the last month.

The problem is that sometimes network communications with VMs go away without any reason, and came back in a couple of seconds with good performance.

If I send some ICMP packets to one of the VMs (even in production LAN or in DMZ) I have something similar :

Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Richiesta scaduta.
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata=1648ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128
Risposta da 192.168.1.231: byte=32 durata<1ms TTL=128

So some lost packets, and some with very poor answer time.

I've just tried to check the bandwith to some VMs and the results was something similar :

iperf.exe -c 192.168.1.2 -i 5 -t 60

Client connecting to 192.168.1.2, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)

1912 local 192.168.1.242 port 5044 connected with 192.168.1.2 port 5001
ID Interval Transfer Bandwidth
1912 0.0- 5.0 sec 55.2 MBytes 92.6 Mbits/sec
1912 5.0-10.0 sec 54.4 MBytes 91.2 Mbits/sec
1912 10.0-15.0 sec 43.4 MBytes 72.8 Mbits/sec
1912 15.0-20.0 sec 45.0 MBytes 75.5 Mbits/sec
1912 20.0-25.0 sec 53.9 MBytes 90.5 Mbits/sec
1912 25.0-30.0 sec 53.7 MBytes 90.1 Mbits/sec
1912 30.0-35.0 sec 54.5 MBytes 91.4 Mbits/sec
1912 35.0-40.0 sec 55.2 MBytes 92.5 Mbits/sec
1912 40.0-45.0 sec 55.3 MBytes 92.7 Mbits/sec
1912 45.0-50.0 sec 40.4 MBytes 67.8 Mbits/sec
1912 50.0-55.0 sec 0.00 Bytes 0.00 bits/sec
1912 55.0-60.0 sec 11.6 MBytes 19.5 Mbits/sec
1912 0.0-60.0 sec 523 MBytes 73.0 Mbits/sec

I was connected to a 100 Mb/s switch so about 90 Mb/s is good, but the other value is not so good.

I've check the hardware twice, update all BIOS, firmware, and so on of the phisical server .....

Any hint ?

Thank you in advance.

Bye

Riccardo Riva
VCP,RHCE,FCNSA
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problem with traffic shaping

Tornado2800 — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:46:36 GMT

im limited bandwidth port to 10 Mbps for some VMs
now i want disable that , so im disabling traffic shaping in ESXI
but still bandwidth are 10 MBPS for same vm
whats wrong ?

Installation of esxi 3.5 on dl140 g2 with adaptec 2420sa raid card

kbvict — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:19:28 GMT

I'm trying to install esxi 3.5 update 4 on an old hp dl 140 g2 server as a test. I know that the server hardware is not supported by default, so I bought a new raid card, the adaptec 2420sa. I've configured two 80gb disks as a raid 1 array on the adaptac raid card, I also made the array bootable.

When I try to install esxi 3.5 from cd, it gives me the error: Unable to find a supported device to write the image to, so seems like the raid card is not supported. I've did a search on the forum and looks like others managed to get this card working. Am I missing out on something? Can anyone point me in some direction?

Dell R200 VM's can't communicate to outside

ncl_knight — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:56:22 GMT

Hi.

I have a Dell R200 server, 8Gb RAM, dual 500Gb HDD's in a RAID 1 (hardware Perc 6i card) . I have setup 2 VM's on this, one SBS 2003 and the other Server 2003. Both install fine and I can access via the ESXi console (running on my laptop).

Problem I have is that I can't ping anything (or access anything) outside the VM. Can't ping one VM from the other, the router etc etc.

With just SBS 2003 ( and no ESXi) all is fine.

So, what am I missing?

Thankyou one and all. If more information is required as to setup,I will post back.

esxtop -c switch not working in batch mode.

C_R_M — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:45:04 GMT

Update. Dang I have this in the wrong spot. I am running ESX 3.5 not ESXi

OK I assume I am doing something wrong here. I launched esxtop and when through and deleted all the counters except the disk counters I wanted to capture and the using "W" I saved the file off to .disk.

Here is the contents of .disk esxtop config file

abcdefgh
abcdefghijklmno
ABCDEfgHIjklm
abcdefghijk
abcdefghijk
abcdefghijklm
5d

If I launch esxtop -c /tmp/.disk it work I only see the disk counters.

If However I launch in batch mode (my goal) using

esxtop -c /tmp/.disk -b -d 15 -n10 > /tmp/diskio.csv

esxtop -b -d 15 -n10 -c /tmp/.disk > /tmp/diskio.csv

I end up with a .csv file that still contains all the counters.

What am I doing wrong?

ESXi 4 new XP Pro VMs won't autosize when resizing console

FrayAdjacent — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:33:33 GMT

I've searched and found a few related threads, but no solutions were found.

I installed ESXi 4 on a Dell Vostro 200 yesterday, and after it would not successfully start a couple VMs that I copied from my previous VMware Server 2.0 environment, I had to create a couple new XP VMs. Both are running XP Professional (Volume License versions). Both have been fully updated (Windows update) and VMware Tools is installed and functioning.

When I access either guest through the vSphere Client and open external console windows, the only way I can increase resolution is through the guest OSs Display Settings. Under the View menu in the console, if I check AutoFit and then stretch the window, the guest desktop stays the same side, and I either get black bars or sliders. I then go to the View menu again, and click Fit Guest Now, and it wiggles and then resizes the console to fit the guest, when, if I understand the command correctly, it should fit the guest to the console window.

This is functionality I need to work properly due to the way I use my virtual machines. Having a limited desktop size hinders the tasks I need to perform from these VMs.

Slow performance on NIC

jwall04 — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:30:24 GMT

I have a new NetWare 6.5 SP7 and ZEN 7 server which is running virtualized under ESXi 3.5. I noticed that workstations are taking longer to image than they did on the physical server so I ran ifconfig from the console and I can see that the NIC is running to 10000000 (10MB, right?).

VMware says the NIC is negotiating at 1GB. Ifconfig also says the vm is using driver CNEAMD.

I'm not sure how to lock the board to 1GB, or even if that will help.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

vSphere VM's crashing

ScottGill — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:38:03 GMT

Ok this is kind of complicated and I'm fairly new to server virtualization. I'm trying to test out the process of virtualizing a call center using vSphere and View. We have an existing VMI (previous version of vCenter) in place and I did not want to screw that one up for this test. So to get around that I've built 3 VM's on an existing physical ESXi 3.5 server. Two of them are Server 2003 (running vCenter and View, respectively). The third is a vSphere 4.0 server. I imported the vSphere server into vCenter and that went great. Then I created an XP VM on the vSphere server. First round I had the "you may not power on a virtual machine in a virtual machine" error message. I got rid of that using the info from here: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/172395;jsessionid=078D0AB6E691952C08874C7DBFB4AC8E?start=0&tstart=0

Now that that is resolved whenever I power on the XP VM it shows powered on for about 5 seconds and then powers off. In this one I am totally lost as to what to do, the log file doesn't seem to be giving me much information as to what the problem might be. Attached is the log and dump file taken from the VM. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

VSS based VCB Backup

amediratta — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:58:29 GMT

I have read that only for Windows VMs, VCB does a VSS level backup. The C: drive letter of VM becomes H: drive letter of the Proxy server. The only difference here is that it does not take full imge level backup of vmdk files and is supported only for Windows based VMs.

My question is: When C: of VM becomes H: of proxy server, do we still need to mount the C: on the proxy? In vmdk level backups, we need to mount the storage LUN on the proxy server i.e. the proxy server should have an equal size LUN available for VCB backup. If VM is 300 GB, we need a 300 GB LUN on proxy to take its backup? Is it the same for the VSS based Windows VM backup?

VMWare go account locked, or service is down?

Conrad44 — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:19:25 GMT

The go looks like a good idea for managing an ESXi installation. However, I was able to log in to it only once. After that I can't get in. My login and password are not being recognized.

I tried to log in from another pc - the same result. It looks like my account is locked. Is there any way to reset it?

Thanks,

Greg

Vmware Swich mostra sitio web desde red publica o interna

tauri — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:48:32 GMT

Tengo instalado el Vmware ESX 3i 3.5 , y tengo ahi un servidor virtual de aplicacion Web, y este se ve bien si lo veo desde un vswitch1 con red publica,

pero si lo veo desde dentro de mi red interna el sitio no lo veo y me lleva a la administracion por web del vmware ESX 3i 3.5 y esta va por el vswitch0.

Alguna idea

New to ESXi - stuck on VLANs

uptonpark — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:11:20 GMT

Hi all,

Fairly new to ESXi 3.5, setup test rig, everything seems fine except can't get VLANs working, have checked all previous posts, kb's etc and can't see my error, there must be one.

I can't get the VM's to the router and outside world although VM's on same VLAN id can ping each other. If I give the portgroup VLAN id 4095 (all) then it's fine, but anything else and no joy.

I'm wondering if it's my switch, it's Zyxel ES3124 with VLAN, GVRP, etc, tried enabling trunking, tagging, the lot.

If the switch is no good, can anyone recommend a switch that's know to work with ESXi 3.5?, preferably not Cisco.

Any help much appreciated, thanks.

Message was edited by: uptonpark (corrected spelling of Zyxel)

VC can't trun off power on VM??

BanchaTH — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:20:41 GMT

Hello Alls,

My ESX 3.5 when i'm try power off on some VM is said 'operation failed since another task in progress' and can't trun off it. How i can trun off VM? or Anybody Who know methos for view process that interupt on this VM?

Any updates! Please suggestion to me.

Regard and Thank

Bancha k.

Change all paths on IBM SVC hosted datastore

oturn — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:31:08 GMT

My storage administrator need to change all of the current fibre paths on our active datastores. Our datastores are being hosted by an IBM SAN Volume Controller. We need to move from one SVC to another.

The LUN as presented by the SVC will actually be deleted then recreated with new paths, but the underlying data will obviously remain intact.

Is this simply a matter of powering down all VM's, waiting for the change to complete, then refreshing the paths on the datastores, or is there another procedure we need to follow?

Host permissions

RichardBrown — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:14:53 GMT

Hi,

does anyone know of any documentstion or articles refering to creating local users and groups on ESX hosts. I have created the user account and group via using the VC onto the individula host but i need to know how to lock down the access granted. i.e. the account needs to be able to use gz to zip vm's create folders remove folders and copy folders. I don't want to provide root access to individuals however i need to pass over certain tasks all the groups that currently exist don't detail what they permit. I also need to know ow to provide that account with access via SSH..

thanks

Rich

Performance Chart is hanged for VM guest

SonyRaymond — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:08:31 GMT

Hi,

I am using ESX3.5i (Build 153875) to host three VM guests.I used VMWare Infrastructure

client to admin this host.

A few months ago, one of the VM guests had been under stress tests for a month.

After the stress tests period, the VM guest is no longer able to show "performance" chart

on its VM "performance tab". It always show "Retreiving chart data" and no more response.

Now, only the host and another two VM guests can show the performance charts.

Does anyone encounter this situation? Any ways to fix this?

Thanks,
Raymond

Servercrash leads to unstartable VM

rezwiebel — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:22:09 GMT

Hi,

one of our ESXi Servers crashed, and i tried to start the VM of one Server on my other ESXi.

Then comes the error message: Could not power on VM: No swap file.

Google says, that the VM is used somehow and i have to kill the process, that is using

the VM. But, the server isn't available anymore, that hosted the VM and i cannot connect

on it to kill any processes. What can i do else?

Bye

René

Choosing hardware for small ESXi setup - RAID controller/disk and RAM questions

neglas — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:12:53 GMT

I am in the proces of finding new hardware for a small ESXi setup with around 10-12 VMs running Windows. Its a 10 people company, so there is not a very big load on any of the services we are running.

I am pretty set on choosing a Hewlett Packard ML 350 G6 LFF server with a single XEON 5504 processor and 16 GB of RAM to begin with.

RAM

The server comes with 2 x 2 GB RDIMM DDR3. I was thinking I would put another 3x4GB Kingston DDR3 1333 to reach 16 GB. Can I do that or does the RAM need to be added in pairs or something?

RAID

The RAID controller included is a P410i with zero memory. I am thinking that it will be sufficient for my needs, since there is no particular load on the disks. However, I have read that a BBWC will offer a perfomance boost, but I am unsure if it is worth the extra money? I am thinking I can always add the BBWC module later, if I find out I need it. Any thoughts on that?

DISKS

Also, I am unsure as to which disks are sufficient. Initially I was thinking that a couple of SATA 7200 RPM disks in RAID-1 would do fine. But there is also the option of going for 15.000 RPM SAS disk, but they are three times more expensive. Do you guys think it would be money well spent to opt for the SAS disks, considering the currently rather small load on the server?

Any thoughts and opinions greatly appreciated. If you need more info from me, just let me know and I will provide it ASAP.

Kind regards,

Niklas Petersen

Denmark

Unable to edit vmx file

smgopinath2000 — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 06:32:36 GMT

Hi pals,

Im trying to set up a test san environment using vmware esx server 3.5, within vmware workstation 6.5, i am not able to edit the vmx file to add the below entries.

ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
ethernet0.connectionType = "bridged"
monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = TRUE
monitor_control.vt32 = TRUE
monitor.virtual_exec = "hardware"

Which should be added to vmx file , to run the esx server within workstation 6.5, but im not able to edit the file using notepad. It throws the error :

" Cannot create h:\esx\esx1.vmx file "

when trying to save the changes to vmx file, i have attached the error. Is that possible to create a separate vmx file instead of using this ?? Please help me

ESXi 3.5 on DL140 G3 Crashes

michaelschroeder — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 11:09:07 GMT

Hi All, i installed ESXi 3.5 on HP DL140 G3 successfully, it gets an IP via DHCP and i could Download and Install the Client. Short Time after Booting the Server, ESXi Crashes everytime. Any Idea or Hint avoiding this is Strongly Welcome. Bright Regards, Michael

vnc with non-US keyboard layouts

Zas — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:30:47 GMT

Hi, I need work with vnc integrated in esx3.5i u4, my keyboard is spanish and don`t work well (keyboard layout is differnt,US) when use vnc viewer for access to my VM (WXP)

I've tried to add RemoteDisplay.vnc.keymap = "es" to the .vmx but this seems to have no effect. Any ideas how to fix this?

thanks

Secure Web Servers, virtual firewalls, and remote management.

DummyFace — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:08:23 GMT

HI,
Security + networking + virtualization = headache for a web developer.

Earlier this year I had big dreams and built a pretty hefty server. My dream was to run a Linux and Windows server to support both email and websites. Now that the server has collected dust for about 8 months I am ready to follow through and get this thing into production or move it to the garage next to my vic20.

Here is what I know:
1. I am not a network or security expert. Not even close.
2. I have played with ESXI and can do the basics.
3. I am really paranoid about security

I was hoping someone with more experience than me could look at my model below and let me know if I am way off base.

My goals are to:
1. Place my server at a collocation.
2. Secure the virtual servers with a virtual firewall
3. Secure my management and daughter card connection with a firewall on a small fanless PC running m0n0wall (supporting VPN)

Before setting up my virtual network, can someone tell me if this is way off base or if there is a better way?

I do not yet own the fanless PC or physical switch. Also, I am booting ESXI from an internal USB, doubt that matters, but I thought I would throw it out there.

Thanks in advance for the kind advice.

Adam

ESX 3.5 Report Summary - 100% CPU/MEM Utilization

tascheHyaene — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:46:24 GMT

Afternoon everyone and Happy Friday,

I've been running into a problem running the Report Summary function in an ESX 3.5 cluster. Both ESX nodes report 100% utilization for CPU and MEM, which I can see during daily ops as entirely inaccurate.

Thought I recalled seeing a post about this before a few months ago, but I can't seem to find it.

Configuring virtual switches

bushtor — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:11:22 GMT

Hi,

We are in the process of configuring ESX3.5i on a couple of Dell PowerEdge servers. These are connected iSCSI wise via a Dell PowerConnect 5424 switch to a PowerVault dual controller SAN array.

As we only use four of the 5424's 24 ports for the SAN, I wonder if there would be disadvantages using some of the unused ports to untag VLANs from the servers' VMWare virtual switches. iSCSI requires Jumbo Frames for optimum throughput, would that be a disadvantage for 'ordinary' gigabit VLAN tagged ethernet traffic to/from the virtual machines?

Would there be other disadvantages of using parts of a switch ports to iSCSI and the remaining for 'regular' ethernet traffic?

The vmware setup has two virtual iSCSI switches, vsw1 and vsw2, one for each NIC port used for iSCSI. The third virtual switch, vsw3, is 'connected' to the remaining four gigabit NIC ports which I want trunked together. Vsw3 has three virtual VLAN nets: VIDs 10, 11 and 12, available for the virtual machines.

However when I created a test virtual machine and connected it to VID11 on vsw3 I could not ping the target network. Does it exist any test console which let me ping or otherwise test connectivity from vmWare (virtualø switches) to external networks...?

Thanks for comments on this

regards Tor

Installing Promise TX4 on ESXI

andymiller6891 — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:11:49 GMT

I have installed esxi onto a 2gb usb pen, works a treat, now i have 4x500gb WD drives on a promise S150 raid card which i belive to be hardware raid. i have checked the simple.map file on esxi and the device ID is there.

is there a way i can configure esxi to see the raid5???

i have followed a tutorial on here but esxi wouldnt boot once i had finished.

Error moving VM from vmware free Server to ESXi

MSchlawin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:24:44 GMT

Hello!

I have a SLES10 vm running on vmware server 2.0 (free version) I want to move it to an ESXi 3.5 server. I am using the vmware vcenter converter standalone. I point the source to "powered on machine", the destination to my ESXi server, and it starts to convert, but I get an error that it could not find the ip address of the converter helper server. So I tried again and manually entered an IP address to use for the converter helper. This time it started the coversion and just hung. I let it sit for 45 minutes but it just hung at 1% with an estimated 24 minutes remaining and never moved.

Any thoughts on what I am doing wrong? When picking the source machine, I would like to just read the vm files directly, rather than using a powered on machine, but I cannot get that to work. It reports that the "source configuration file is invalid, corrupted, or not regognized". Since my source is already a vmware vm, I would think reading the files directly would be easier than converting a running machine.

Do I even need to use the converter? If I copied the vmware Server vm directly to the ESXi server, would it recognize it?

Thanks for any help!

Matt

Getting fault.RestrictedVersion.summary error when i try to create/delete/rename folder on a datastore from VI SDK API'

Chanpra — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:53:44 GMT

I have VI SDK API on a application.When i try to create/delete/rename folder on a datastore onto licensed ESX3.5.i Update 4 is getting error as "fault.RestrictedVersion.summary" but works fine if i remove the License of ESX 3.5.i build 153875. Datastore from Vmware Infrastructure client.

What will be the problem?

Problem with tar on ESXi 3.5

eXeC001er — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:07:36 GMT

I have VA with 2 disks: 2 GB and 4 GB
I pack this VA to tar.gz. Pack is ok.
Unpack this VA finish with result: disk 1: 2 GB disk 2: 2 GB.

Why?
On my disk available >50 GB free space.

My experiment:
1. Make tmpfile with size >2GB:
"dd if=/dev/zero of=tmpfile bs=1M count=3192"
2. Pack this file to tar.gz:
"tar czf tmpfile.tar.gz tmpfile"
3. Delete original file:
"rm tmpfile"
4. Unpack tar.gz:
"tar xzf tmpfile.tar.gz" or
"gunzip tmpfile.tar.gz && tar xf tmpfile.tar.gz" or
"cat tmpfile.tar.gz | tar xz"

Result:
size of file: 2 GB

ILMT (Licence metric tool) on VMware

Pvajdic — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:55:11 GMT

Hi all,

Did someone manage to retreive hardware information from VMware Infrastructure into IBM Licence metric tool? I've been trying to do this for weeks now and no luck so far. In IBM last ILMT documentation it is stated that you can use VirtualCenter server instead of instalig CIT enabler on all ESX hosts. I'm using ESX3.5 and VCServer 2.5 U4. So, I have all SDK libraries automaticaly installed with tools, my ESX hosts and VCServer are accesible via browser, but when I try to add VCServer into ILMT application it says :

An error occured during VM manager communication attempt.

So I'm confused what to do/try next.

Any info would be helpfull.

Regards.

VMWare 3.5 Update

lcohen999 — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:10:57 GMT

We ran a 3.5 update today, and it "seems" to be stuck at 60% and has been that way for about an hour.

The update manager itself has closed, but is still showing in progress in the infrastructure manager.

I am just wondering how long it usually takes and if it has bailed, what my options are.

If I try to re-run update manager it tells me there is always one in progress

Help!!

ESXI 3.5 and Infrastructure Client Issue

sirslacker — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:04:52 GMT

Hello,

I am hoping that someonewill be able to help me out. I have ESXI 3.5.0 Build 153875 and Infrasturctue Client 2.5.0 build

Running on HP DL380 G3, and I have three Guests. Two of the Guests indicate that they are fine in the infrastructure client, however third guest states that it is Unreliable.

I can't open a console, stop, or start, or back it up. Even though the Linux Server Running in the Guest is still alive and well. It is our e-mail server. I can SSH as well as access

e-mail server through webmail. Any ideas on how to fix this without losing the guest, or how this happend?

Thanks,

Mark

Clear error message on console screen

tomvr — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:20:47 GMT

Hi,

Does anyone know how to clear an error message on the console screen of a ESX host? I solved the problem, but the error message remains on the console screen...

Tom

Could not power on VM: Admission check failed for memory resource

yang82126 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:39:40 GMT

Hi all

We have a Dell PowerEdge server 2950 server where ESXi 3.5 is installed for our daily work.

Following is the environment details:

1 CPU: Inter Xeon E5430 2.66GHz. Logical Processors:8

2. Physical Memory Size: 32GB

3.ESXi version: 3i 3.5 153875

Generally, we have 16 VM images(Windows and Unix) running in this server concurrently, sometimes 8 VM images running at least, we are usually facing following error when we power on one of VM images.

The error msg is attached here.

We tried to limit concurrent running VMs numbers to solve this issue, but this solution is not applicable in the log run.

My question :

Is there other better solution for this problem beside limiting running VM images numbers?

Appreicate you can give use some more useful and professional solutions!

Thanks

Yang

Convert Existing VM to OVF

Osteele — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:01:41 GMT

Hello all.

Can someone explain in simple terms how I can convert an existing VM located on my local machine (Created in VMware Workstation 6.5.1)

to an OVF format saved to my local machine that can then be imported into ESXi v.3.5.

I could not find the conversion option in VMware Vcenter converter standalone client v.4.0

Thank you for your time and assitance.

Peter

Looking for a way to make the iSCSI rescan go faster than by default

xitim — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:37:43 GMT

Hi there,

As I'm testing new storage devices these days, I was wondering why the iSCSI software adapter rescan was so slow ? As a matter of a fact, it takes several minutes to find a new iSCSI target (even if it's been added and deleted before). Maybe there's a parameter I shoud change in the Advanced Settings (Scsi section) but I couldn't find which one.

By the way, if it's a normal behavior, do you think it can cause any kind of slowness between the ESX 3.5 host and the iSCSI target ?

Thank you in advance.

Aurelien

http://www.xitim.com

ESX Slow to boot - kb article 1005321

gearoidgriffin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:24:57 GMT

Hi all
I have an issue with an ISCSI setup going to 2 iscsi ports on a clariion (A5 and B5.)

However the adding the iscsi vmhba takes quite a long time, and if we reboot the server it takes a long time as well.
And if we do a tail of the vmkernal file at the time

Sep 25 12:59:32 miloesx vmkernel: 0:02:56:34.736 cpu2:1075)iSCSI: session 0xa218088 to iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.ckm00083800368.a4 failed to connect, rc -113, No route to host
Sep 25 12:59:32 miloesx vmkernel: 0:02:56:34.736 cpu2:1075)iSCSI: session 0xa218088 connect failed at 1059474
Sep 25 12:59:32 miloesx vmkernel: 0:02:56:34.736 cpu2:1075)<5>iSCSI: session 0xa218088 iSCSI: session 0xa218088 retrying all the portals again, since the portal list got exhausted
Sep 25 12:59:32 miloesx vmkernel: 0:02:56:34.736 cpu2:1075)iSCSI: session 0xa218088 to iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.ckm00083800368.a4 waiting 60 seconds before next login attempt
Sep 25 12:59:32 miloesx vmkernel: 0:02:56:34.772 cpu3:1077)iSCSI: bus 0 target 2 trying to establish session 0xa22c180 to portal 0, address 192.168.70.8 port 3260 group 6
Sep 25 12:59:32 miloesx vmkernel: 0:02:56:34.772 cpu3:1077)iSCSI: session 0xa22c180 to iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.ckm00083800368.b4 failed to connect, rc -113, No route to host
Sep 25 12:59:32 miloesx vmkernel: 0:02:56:34.772 cpu3:1077)iSCSI: session 0xa22c180 connect failed at 1059478
Sep 25 12:59:32 miloesx vmkernel: 0:02:56:34.772 cpu3:1077)<5>iSCSI: session 0xa22c180 iSCSI: session 0xa22c180 retrying all the portals again, since the portal list got exhausted
Sep 25 12:59:32 miloesx vmkernel: 0:02:56:34.772 cpu3:1077)iSCSI: session 0xa22c180 to iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.ckm00083800368.b4 waiting 60 seconds before next login attempt
Sep 25 13:00:32 miloesx vmkernel: 0:02:57:34.738 cpu2:1075)iSCSI: bus 0 target 1 trying to establish session 0xa218088 to portal 0, address 192.168.70.2 port 3260 group 5
Sep 25 13:00:32 miloesx vmkernel: 0:02:57:34.738 cpu2:1075)iSCSI: session 0xa218088 to iqn.1992-04.com.emc:cx.ckm00083800368.a4 failed to connect, rc -113, No route to host

Now obviously A4 and B4 are on a completely different subnet and physcial device to A5 and B5 after I went researching I came across kb1005321, which to me looks like a pretty good match

Now as the KB says
Contact your storage vendor for details on setting up ACL on your array. Ummm ACL on a CLARiiON? The only thing I can think of doing is CHAP maybe?
Any thoughts?

Cheers
Gearoid

Conversion Time

Osteele — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:01:22 GMT

Hello all. First time post.

Here is my situation:

I have a Virtual Machine that resides on an external usb drive that is attached to my desktop machine.

I have another PC (HP xw8200) running ESXi 3.5

After reading some of the posts here, I decided to use Standalone Converter to export / move the VM to my ESXi machine.

The process seems to be running fine, but I find this 1 day(s), 10 hour(s) and 1 minute(s) to be excessively long. At 2% completion.

Note: The VM machine originally consisted of two hard drives approx 120gig of data storage each.

Is this normal?

Thank you for your time and patience

Peter

ESXi 3.5U4, Dell R710, IO AT DMA Engine enabled?

linhnguyen — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:02:27 GMT

Is this supported in ESXi? I haven't found anything saying yes or no really. Our backend is an EqualLogic PS6000 for reference (iSCSI). All I've come across is a McAfee suggestion to turn it on.

Thanks

ESXi 3.5 not detecting additional ports

elysium1298 — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:51:58 GMT

Hello,

I've been trying to add/use additional ports in order to give some of the guests their own network interface (uplink), but ESXi can only see ports 0/1 & 0/2 which in turn are using uplink one or port 0/15.

All interface are enabled when looking at them from Cisco web management page, I have turned on and off from the web gui and command line, and that only manages to change the color on the web gui because it is administratively down. From the VIClient, when I create a vswitch and attempt to add network adapter there are no available adapters, when in reality it should have 12 more (Gi0/3-Gi0/14), I looked at both, viclient and the cisco switch management console, but I just can't bring up the rest of the ports.

Can someone point to what am I missing here? I would like to be able to use all the ports and uplink, to separate our web server from our internal domain servers.

thanks

Specs:

HS21 IBM blade
Four port Cisco blade switch 3012
ESX Server i3, ver 3.5.0 (build 143129) Embeded

HA failure (?) or host failure, virtual machines are going down until physical reboot

sbh — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:22:27 GMT

Good morning,

I have a wierd problem here. I cannot yet figure out what's happening exactly, but here are the symptoms.

Running 6 physical servers in a cluster, with configured HA & DRS. Running esxi 3.5 build 163429

What happenned today is that virtual machines went offline. (around 80 machines (*argh*)). When I launched the vcenter, all but one of the servers were greyed and the status was saying : (not responding)

When I iLO the hosts, it looks like it's up and running. When the cursor moves on " Configure management network", it freezes there. The only solution I found was tophysically reboot theservers, then switch all the virtual servers on again.

Restarting the management agent won't help. I cannot figure out what's going on. Is it a known problem or not, no idea. The network cables and connections are 100% sure...

Any ideas ? Anywhere I could find someinteresting logs?

unable to install vmware tools for RHEL5 on ESX 3i

durgabaps — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:05:55 GMT

Hi Guys

Any body installed RHEL 5 on ESX 3i... I am unable to install the vmware tools after the install...

Let me know if any work around...

Thanks,

ESXi 3.5 with multiple network adapters

JackHolstein — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:22:00 GMT

We have 8 network adapters on the server with ESXi 3.5, from the VM IC, under Configuration tab > Network Adapters, I can see all the NICs, but is there anyway I can blink/flash them to identify which is which, so I can plug the right network cables?

Thanks

ESXi Server connection problem !

Helpuser777 — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:45:00 GMT

Hi,

I have installed ESXi server on a new Dell Desktop. I had some issues with a on-board NIC. But when I plugged in a compatible NIC it was OK.

Then I downloaded the VIC and I could connect and create a Virtual Machine. Then I had to restart the server and when it came up it could not find an Operating System. Really interesting !!!!!! I don't know I may have tried to grab some storage which was allocated to the server itself ????? No idea.

I had no option but to reinstall the ESXi server again, hoping that everything would be OK. But for some reason I cannot connect to the server anymore !!!!!

I have spent about 2 days trying to figure this out re-installing this many times. But all I get is : from the infrastructure client:

VMWare Infrastructure Client could not establish the initial connection with server "<IP>"

Details: Connection failure occured.

From the bowser (Firefox)

Connection Interrupted !

If I do a telnet to port 902:

It connects to the vmware deamon. (But I don't know what this means regarding the issue I have)

Really appreciate if somebody can help me.

Unable to remove datastore

ianjINS — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:06:14 GMT

We had a dev box that failed when trying to migrate it to another host. The box ended up being in an invalid state. The box was no longer needed so it was just removed for the VC inventory. I wasn't involved with it and the person that was is no long available so I don't have any information as to what happen at the time.

Today I was trying to remove our old digital media store datastore (iscsi lun) as we moved to a NFS based datastore for this purpose.

Unfortunately I was not able to remove this store using VC. The following error would appear when trying to do so: "The resource is in use".
I could log into each ESXi host individually and remove the datastore, however on one particular host I would receive the error: "Error during the configuration of the host: DestroyVmfsDatastore: can't delete partition 1 on lun vmhba34:1:0"

I have verified using the MAP tab and manually checking each VM that no vdmk files or ISOs sit on this store, but I did discover that the vmdk files for the failed dev box are on the store, I am not able to manually delete the vmdks from the datastore (error appears as "unable to delete file") so it appears the orphaned vmdks are causing the problem.

Does anyone know of anyway to remove the orphaned vmdks and then remove the unneeded datastore without rebooting the host?

Cheers for any help.

ESXi 3.5 (and ESXi 4.0) host CD/DVD-ROM: "No Devices available"

INSEEK — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:24:31 GMT

Hi,

I am experiencing a problem with my internal CD-DVD-ROM installed on 2U Supermicro chassis/ Supermicro X7DCX board (Intel 5100 chipset). The board is very similar to X7DCL-3 / X7DCL-i which is supported. The problem I have on both boards is that I can install ESXi 3.5U4, but after install there is no host CD/DVD-ROM at all. The only way I can install VM is via client's optical drive or from ISO.

ESX 4.0 cannot be installed at all as at one point the installer asking me to provide a CD (DVD) with installation files even I booted up fromit and started the installation (it happens soon after it ask for time settings).

However, I was able to install any version of ESX/ESXi using external DVD-RW.

I did play a while with BIOS setting trying to set different modes for SATA controller but nothing worked.

Here what I have now:

Serial ATA: Enabled
Native mode operation ~~Auto / Setial ATA~~: Auto
SATA controller mode Option ~~Compatible/Enhanced~~: Enhanced
SARA RAID: Disabled
SATA AHCI Enable: Enabled (tried with Disabled also).

Compatible: SATA & PATA drives are auto-detected and placed in Legacy mode.
Enhanced (non-ACHI) mode: SATA & PATA drives are auto-detected and placed in Native IDE mode

The device is connected to IDE port on motherboard..

Any ideas and suggestions?

Thank you.

Memory useage query.

ianroche80 — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:18:41 GMT

We have just upgraded our two Dell R900 boxes with more memory. Before we upgraded the boxes had been running on 48GB and 32GB . They had been running at about 80% memory utilization. Since upgrading them at the weekend to 128GB the memory useage has jumped on both boxes to 100GB . Looking at the virtual machine active useage and even allowing for the memory over head for each vm this doesnt add up. The majority of machine's on each box have 4GB of Ram and 2 VPC's .No reservation set and unlimited is selected, all shares are set to normal. Any idea as to why it has jumped all of a sudden as stated before the upgrade the mem utuilization was about 80% and we didn't see any slowness in the performance of the machines. Both boxes are running ESXi 3.5. If anyone has any ideas id love to hear them!

Thanks

Ian

Install esxi 3.5 or 4 in HP proliant ML110 G1

meleke — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:52:33 GMT

Hi, I am trying to install ESXi 4.0 on a HP Proliant ML110 G1, but
installation is locked to be loading modules, the CD is not damaged,
and install it on a PC and all, if you can install this version on this
model Proliant ?

esxi 3.5 u4 suddenly doesn't boot

mla! — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:55:27 GMT

Hello,

I have a problem with booting up ESXi 3.5 update 4.

It's installed on DL360 G4 4GB 2x146GB 15K (in mirror) and running in LAB.

Yesterday I properly shutdown guest and host.

When server starts I can see that 1 logical volume detected. No errors. Just after attemting to boot from CD it doesn't boot ESXi and stays on PXE...

What will be a fixing path?

Thx.

Michael.

What does the warning "Reverting to snapshots might generate errors" exactly mean?

biokovo — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 19:42:25 GMT

When cloning a VM wtih snapshots there is a warning "Reverting to snapshots might generate errors".

What does it exactly mean? When does reverting to snapshots generate errors, and when does it not? And, is the problem only with snapshots or the problem can be with starting that clone?

Thanks

Event 580, VM failed to start

voro — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:06:29 GMT

host: vmware esx server 3i, 3.5.0, build 184236

guest: linux 2.6.27-14

After a programmed reboot (via at) of a dozen VMs running linux, one of them failed to restart. Some minutes later I was able to start it with VI client.

ESXi log entry:

Hostd: ~~2009-09-18 04:06:51.514 'ha-eventmgr' 868368 info~~ Event 580 : Message on VM_NAME on esxi_hostname in ha-datacenter: *** VMware ESX Server internal monitor error *** vcpu-3:VMM fault: regs=0x2cdc, exc=14, eip=0xe1c57

VM syslog:

no entries after normal shutdown messages

Any ideas? Need more info?

Mysterious disconnect/reconnect of host from VC

VirtualTman — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:58:52 GMT

Why would one of my ESX3.5 hosts disconnect from VC 2.5 server and reconnect, within a minute, without anything going on at all in the environment and no changes being made?

Its as if the VC Agent was restarted on the ESX Server, same symptoms. The other 3 ESX Servers were fine.

The guests were all still up, just obviously showed as disconnected until the host connected back again.

Has anyone seen this and know what it could be as I'm unsure, any help would be great, thanks.

I have checked licensing, license server, NTP, all seemed fine.

Weird.

Enabling SSH on Host

satishpatial — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:17:44 GMT

How can i enable SSH on ESX host

How to configure NTOP VM properly when dual-homed, one NIC being promisc

JRodder — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:07:58 GMT

I have a problem I have been trying to wrap my head around. I would like to run an ntop monitoring machine inside of my host. The NIC used for monitoring should only be accessible from the ntop VM, and the OS should be able to set that NIC to promisc mode in order to sniff all traffic properly. The other NIC will be used normally, for machine access and management. I have attached a picture showing what I have now. Currently, when I boot the ntop OS, both NICs will receive an address via DHCP (until I would be able to figure out which nic is which, by ping testing, then I could edit /etc/networking/interfaces) when I start a ping test to both of the virtual nics, it seems they are actually both connecting to either vmnic0 or vmnic1. I have restared the esxi host a few times, and it seems random so far as to which physical NIC the OS binds to. I verified that by starting a ping test to both of the IPs of the virtual NICs, and then unplugging cables. Disconnecting 1 physical NIC will either do nothing, or disconnect both virtual NICs.

I apologize if I don't have my terminology correct, I am new to this. I will be glad to clarifiy if anyone can find the time to help me sort the issue. I am guessing it's some sort of operator error.

Can ESXI support convertion ?

leiw324 — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:01:21 GMT

Hello

I'm planning physical machine to ESXI 4 virtual machine, can converter_standalone support it ?

Thank !

ESXi 3.5 Repair?

danhandy — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:52:18 GMT

Hello,

I am having problems with ESXi 3.5...

I can access the ESX server via VI client ONLY, virtual machines are 'invalid' but I can still connect to the VM's via remote desktop(VM's are all up). VM's are server 2003 and server 2007

The problem first arose when we where unable to connect to a handful of ESX boxes via the infrastructure client, we restarted the management hosts via the basic console interface and this solved this problem on all boxes apart from *****

****'s basic console interface disappeared and a CLI window appeared, at first we could enter privileged mode but as soon as we tried to submit a command it locked up and became completely unmanageable. (locked up)

The server was then restated this morning, but is still completely unmanageable, when accessing the server via Infrastructure Client all the hosts appear as ‘invalid'.

I was thinking about using the repair option on VMware-VMvisor-InstallerCD-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386_DELLCustomized.iso CD, I wanted to know if I do use the repair function what would happen to the VM's? would they get deleted? Should I disconnect the MD300? The more into the better.

Extra Info: ESX is installed on internal storage on a Dell Power Edge 2950, and the VM's are stored on a Dell MD300 storage array, the MD300 is reporting no errors.

Hope this makes sence to you all,

Thank you,

Daniel

Different values for free disk space from mob and actual value displayed in VC client.

suapte — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 06:30:38 GMT

Hello Experts,

We have a situation as follows:-

Setup:- 2 ESX 3.5 servers having shared disk associated with them.

Observation:-

1.When executed "mob" for each server we see certain value for free disk space. This value appears different for each ESX server for the same shared storage.

2. The value for free disk space appears different in the VC client for the concerned ESX servers. The value I am getting from the Java SDK matches with the value from the mob but not with the value displayed in the VC client.

Can any body please let me know how this can be rectified?

Thanks,

~Sujit Apte.