VMware Communities : Unanswered Threads - VMware vSphere™

Thin Provisioning not working for storage vmotion

rsaha — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:37:33 GMT

I am working in a storage migration project of VMs.In the environment we have VCS ver 4.0 and ESX 3.5 servers.We need to move all the VMs from symmetric to clarion storage.So i did the storage vmotion(GUI) with thin provisioning as a option to move the VMs during pilot phase.After the migration completed,the VM disk till showing Thick format instead of thin.

Also i have moved the VM from one datastore to another datastore in clarion(same storage box,but different lun) using storage vmotion with same option and its working fine.The VM disk showing Thin.

Can anybody help me why thin provisioning is not working when moving to different storage (symmetric to clarion) box using storage vmotion?

Get-Cluster - CPU Usage 95%

harkamal — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:18:20 GMT

Get-Cluster appears to be an expensive query, on the VC, CPU usage goes as high as 95% (for vmxd.exe) when using get-cluster, otherwise it is fine.

Is there any workaround to avoid this, or an equivalent SDK method ?

Get-VM | %{
   Get-Cluster -vm $_.Name
}

Guests on ESXi 4 shutdown

jvigil — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:58:29 GMT

HP DL 380 dual QC's w/12GB RAM

I just did my first install of ESXi 4 today on this brand new server. I then installed a couple 2k8r2 DC's and a 2K8 FS to mess with. Everything went together quite nicely with vSphere.

Then I fired up about half a dozed vm's (on my workstation) that I had build some time ago with Sun's Virtual Box and started joining them to the new DC's (on the ESXi server). My local workstation (with vSphere running) bogged down hard- as to be expected, and a few minutes later when I couldn't join on of the vm's to the domain, I noticed that all of the VM's I had built in ESXi had shutdown! There were plenty of resources available on the stand alone HP.

I shut all the Sun VM's down. Restarted the ESXi VM's and repeated with the same result. When firing up the VM's with Virtual Box on the workstation, vSphere goes into a "not responding" mode and after the workstation cpu's stop being pegged and I go look at ESXi it shows that the VM's are off.

Looking through the Event log on the servers shows no 6008 event!! The "Events" tab in ESXi shows that the VM was shutdown, and the NIC time shows that the VM has booted, in addition to me being able to see the boot up process from the console.

What is going on? If vSphere stops responding, does it shutdown the ESXi VM's? Even if my workstation, running vSphere were to crash, I would expect that the VM's on the ESXi box would continue to run.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thank you,

-ESX noob

High CPU utilization after upgrade to ESX 4 Update 1

shrex — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:24:57 GMT

I have just upgraded 2 hosts (IBM HS21 Blades) from ESX 4 to ESX 4 Update 1 and now I'm experiencing extremely high CPU utilization. Previously the utilization on each host would be around 10% but now after the upgrade it is around 80% on each and now all of the VMs are running very slow as a result.

The only change that has been made is that I downgraded the local hard disk drives from mirrored 500GB 7,200RPM SAS drives to mirrored 73GB 10,000RPM SAS drives and performed a clean install of ESX 4U1 on each host. As the 14 VMs are located on a SAN disk array I thought this would only improve the performance of the hosts.

Has anyone else had a similar issue or a potential fix?

Cheers,
Josh.

cannot convert acronis tib file with converter

tdubb123 — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:00:15 GMT

I created an image of a hard drive but now when I try to convert that using vm converter standalone it is saying the source virtual machine is not recognized

One VM with poor network performance

ToddFry — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:50:29 GMT

I have two VMs running on ESXi 4. Both VMs have good network performance on their segment and between themselves, but communication by one of them to another network segment is very poor.

This problem existed with VMWare Server 2.0, so I upgraded and converted the machines this weekend to ESXi 4, hardware version 7, but the problem still persists.

I have deleted and recreated the NIC on the affected VM. I have changed its IP. I have double checked all settings and they are identical to the machine that doesn't have a problem.

The VMs are both Server 2003 Standard 32-Bit.

Any ideas on how to resolve this would be appreciated.

Thanks.

VCB 1.5 not deleting

fafa24 — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:32:55 GMT

Hi,

I use VCB 1.5 with Backupexec 12.5 for Full-VM. It works great, the only problem I have it does not delete the mounted files on the proxy after the backup is done. The snapshot gets deleted. I support another side with almost identical setup and there it works.

Thanks
Edy

Disable the question in vCenter at shutdown of a VM??

HenrikElm — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:32:29 GMT

vCenter/ESXi 4.0 U1:

When powering off a VM, there appears a yellow bubble on the VM and it wants to know if I want to power off or take a snapshot. I always want it to just power off, but i DO NOT want to sit there and manually answer all the bubbles.. How is this done?

/Henrik

p2v to local usb drive

tdubb123 — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:32:19 GMT

I am running stanadlone converter 4.0.1 how do I p2v a runing physical machine to a local usb disk? I cannot p2v to a datastore because of slow network issues.

ESXi 4 locks up every couple days

lowburb — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:19:06 GMT

I am running a whitebox and when I first got it up and running, it was running flawless for weeks. It eventually started locking up and becoming absolutely unresponsive. I can't ping the host IP, I can't log in with VClient, and I can't even get the console to respond to keyboard inputs.

I first thought that I had too many VM's running on it, so I looked at the historical performance graphs in VCenter Server (Eval Version) and it was all low usage of everything (RAM, CPU, Disk). I have upto 5 VM's running (4 2008 64bit and 1 XP 32bit). I started moving the VM's to a VMServer and had it down to 1 VM on the ESXi host. I dont know if I was impatiant but it seemed to run fine for 5+ days so I started moving VM's back to ESXi one by one (using the free converter). It seemed to run fine for a bit, and now it's back to locking up about once every day or two. It had at one time gotten where it was locking up multiple times per day.

My next step was I thought maybe having the two network ports plugged in, something was getting confused as to which interface was used for management without actually doing any additional configuration on the Vswitch. Although I setup the one NIC as the management interface, I figured I try unplugging the second NIC. It's still locking up

I found one other thread about the same type of symptoms, but that persons problems seem to be locking up every couple of hours, at a minimum. I'll go anywehre from 12 hours to 2-3/4 days. My VM's are not resource intensive by any means. I have an AD server with one user, two Exchange servers with one mailbox, and an XP machine doing some media sharing to my network

My hardware is as follows:

Supermicro C2SEA
Xeon X3360
8GB RAM (if someone wants to know specifically what, I can find out)
Intel Pro gigabit PCIx NIC
LSI 3Ware 9690 Raid card
***5 1TB HDD's in raid5 with two volumes configured on that raid to split it in half
***I had to use the update host utility to install the 3ware drivers from their website
***I have all VM's installed on one of the two volumes, the second volume is empty
74GB 10kRPM WD HDD - this is where ESXi is installed, nothing else is on this datastore

I have not done anything much different than default when setting up ESXi or the guests or the network. I have also not done anything for resource allocation because I have not taken the time to learn how to set that up correctly yet. I also have the host attached to an eval version of VCenter Server.

I have looked through the logs and nothing shows up. It doesnt even recognize the fact that it's become unresponsive. The only way to pull it out of this "state" is by doing a hard reset. I also lose all connectivity to the VM guests too.

If anyone has any ideas, maybe I missed something or there is a known issue with one of the pieces of hardware I am using, I'd greatly appreciate any guidance.

Datastores Disappeared!

manfriday — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:06:23 GMT

Yikes.

So, yesterday I upgrade my vcenter server to version 4 update 1.

I log in and it is upgradeing the vpxa agents on my hosts.

two of the hosts work fine. one fails.

I cant seem to get the agent to install, and the host shows up as "disconnected"

connecting it wont work.

All of the VM's are running, so I decide to wait until the weekened (we are a 9-5 shop) to reboot that host.

I reboot the host this morning, and the agent installs fine.

However all of the VM's on that host are "inaccessible"

I look and see that the datastores are all gone.

The LUNS appear OK in the iSCSI software controller.

SO, I go to another host to add the offline VM's to a working box.. I right click the datastore and click 'browse'

I get a message saying something along the lines of "datastore1 \ does not exist"

then all the datastores from THAT host disappear.

Any ideas?

Passthrough Abit AirPace PCI-E

tompl — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:06:33 GMT

Hi,
I'm having some problems with my Abit WiFi card. I bought this specially to passthrough this device to a VM. I had to buy a PCI-E card, because i have one device in PCI slot, and i couldnt passthrough second PCI device to other VM.

The situation looks like this:
1. Abit AirPace works fine only when is connected directly (without ESXI server) to OS(checked on Windows XP and Linux).
2. After passthrough this device either to a Windows/Linux VM, i can install it but i cant find any networks (led on that device shines normal). In Abit airpace software in statistics i see that all TX packets are dropped.
I also tried to make a ad-hoc network, and try to connect from my laptop but it doesnt see this network.

Is there any chance to make it working properly?

Regards,
tompl

PSOD after U1 upgrade by updatemanager

Oletho — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:16:01 GMT

Update manager install timed out during remediate of the first host that I tried to update.

Now I get a PSOD on the first part of boot sequence, right after scheduler is loaded. The server can boot into troubleshooting mode, but I have not had the time to investigate yet.

Any suggestions before I try another host?

Server: HP BL495c G5

Ole Thomsen

VMware converter standalone

Formatter — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:20:46 GMT

So is there a new converter coming out that will convert 2008 R2??? since the esxi 4 u1 is out now and supports 2008 R2. Stanalone that is.

Help Request - XXX com.vmware.vc.stats.StatsInsertErrorEvent.category not found error

PaulLeclair — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:32:57 GMT

Hi all,
I just completed a fresh installation of vSphere 4 on a 2003 server with SQL 2005. I went through all of the database steps (running each sql script in the order per the documentation). I've successfully installed vSphere on the server and have been able to attach all of my ESX 4 hosts. The database permissions are good (using full control to the VCDB and UMDB). The servers are licensed off the Enterprise licenses.

Here's the issue I'm facing. When I view performance stats on the hosts, I the form layout of the charts, but no data inside of the charts. The performance charts for the realtime views look okay, but nothing historical is saving.

I've looked at the SQL database and there is no data in the dbo.vpx_hist_stat, stat1, stat2, stat3 or stat4 tables. I've looked at the dbo.vpx_stat_config and stat_counter and there's no data there either. I thougtht maybe that it was a sql permissions issue, but I've reset the datasource to use the SA account, but still nothing goes in.

Everytime I open up the performance tab in the VIC, I get the following error in the event log on the vic:

Type Time Description
XXX com.vmware.vc.stats.StatsInsertErrorEvent.category not found XXX11/20/2009 1:20:00 PM event.com.vmware.vc.stats.StatsInsertErrorEvent.fullFormat (com.vmware.vc.stats.StatsInsertErrorEvent)

I thought I'd start here and see if anyone can help me before digging further.

Thanks!
Paul

Licensing Single ESXi 4 server, vSphere Client and VMware Go web interface

homerun — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:51:24 GMT

I have questions about free single server licensing of ESXi 4 if just using the vSphere Client (not vSphere Center) and using VMware Go. I will also write about my experience licensing ESXi to provide some contribution to those finding this post while searching about licensing.

My questions first.
(1) Can multiple installations of vSphere Client be used with a single ESXi 4 server without licensing issues. I just converted a single ESXi 4 out of evaluation mode by assigning a license key using the vSphere Client. Later I will be moving the server to the production environment. When I do so, the vSphere Client software will have to be installed on another Windows OS. Will the 2nd instance of vSphere Client connect to ESXi 4 without additional licensing requirements.

(2) I cannot figure out how to use VMware GO Beta to manage the ESXi server. Is it an additional download? Is it the http://server_ip_address link which I used, for instance, to download the vSphere Client?

Many of you reading this may be new to VMware, as I am, and testing ESXi 4 server and decide to use it permanently. After installing ESX and the vSphere Client, you will continue getting license expiration warnings when starting vSphere client. In order to license it free, click on the "Upgrade your ESX host license" link in that warning box. A browser will start and take you to the VMware Vsphere web page. Login using the account you previously created, probably when you first downloaded ESX. Hover your mouse over the "Products" tab and then select the "VMware ESXi" link. Then click the Download link. Then click the "Continue" button. At this point, I could see my license key. Copy your key your clipboard.

Then, finish starting the vSphere Client by closing the license warning box. Make sure the ESX Server is selected, not any of the vm's. Click the "Configuration" tab, then "Licensing Features", then "Edit", and then assign your license key. You can toggle back to evaluation mode. If I had know this 40 days ago, I would have licensed it then. However, then I was concerned I would permanently loose some features which, as it turned out, I didn't need with single ESX server management. Having come back to the issue 40 days later, I had forgotten much of what I had read in the installation manual.

I called VMware Sales several times and created a web form question. The sales people are mostly geared to Enterprise Sales, and some apparently are not aware of what I just explained. Also, they responded slowly in one case and not at all three times. At the time I contacted sales, I assumed I would be paying for a single server vSphere Client license, but apparently it is free to use with one ESX server, explaining sale's nonresponsiveness. For some reason, I had assumed it would cost about $250, which seems reasonable to me.

Having worked with Hyper-V and tried to work with Linux XEN, I am very impressed with ESX. ESX handles Linux distro clients much better than Hyper-V.

I hope I save others valuable time. Also please don't forget I have several questions.

Thanks,

RH

P.S. If you toggle back to Evaluation Mode, as I did to write this post, the license key information is lost, and you'll have to add it again. It appears it relicensed ok with the same license key, which would indicate that it may be ok to use more than one vSphere Client.

vCenter reports no utilization on server, but VMs still run. Can't snapshot.

cajx — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:18:05 GMT

I have the distinct feeling rebooting the ESXi server will fix this, but right now we have seen/are seeing this:

1. vCenter reported it couldn't talk to blade 1 in our IBM blade center. But VMs never went down.

2.There are no active errors showing in vCenter for the blade.

3. Under the Virtual machines Tab, it shows Host CPU and Host mem and Guest Mem as zeros... it sees no activity.

4. Vmware snapshots (note, these are initiated by the n-series/netapp storage) fail with errors such as:

2009-11-20 00:15:25,830 WARN - VMware Task "CreateSnapshot_Task" for
entity "server1.domain.COM" failed with the following error: The
operation is not allowed in the current state.
2009-11-20 00:15:25,830
ERROR - VM "server1.domain.COM" will not be backed up since vmware snapshot create operation failed.

and

The operation is not allowed in the current state, under the Tasks and Events tab.

I'm just noting what we are seeing/doing. After we contact IBM support, we are just going to try to Vmotion the VMs off the weird blade and reboot it.

Our system is composed of IBM n-series storage (IBM branded NetApp), an IBM H chassis (BladeCenter-H), several blades HS22 (Type 7870), and Cisco ethernet switches.We use NFS for the storage. We still have a very very light load on this whole system because we keep seeing random bugs like this.

Are these just typical vCenter type bugs not to worry about? Reboot and you are fine type stuff, sort of like things you typically see in the windows world? Or something more sinister is lurking?

VM Performance Hostory Migration - Possible?

CapiZikus — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:28:10 GMT

All,

We're planning to create a new vCenter4 with a new 2008 DB, new DC name and add ESXs server to this new environment.

The current ESXs are managing by VC3.5 and don't want to use the current DB due to performance issue (we think this might to do with corrupt data in the DB, but not 100% sure).

We know how to migrate the Esxs from old VC to new vCenter4, however one of the requirment of the task is the new vCenter is should able to show/report statistic of all VMs which we not sure a best practise to do this.

I'm thinking of migrage the DB to 2008 first then upgrade the current VC to vCenter4, then add a new vCenter to co-manage the ESXs then depromote the old VC(the one that just upgraded from VC3.5).

I will then create a brand new DB and run backup-restore from the old DB (the one just upgrade from 2003), then point a new vCenter4 to the brand new 2008 DB

Is this a best way to do?

Thanks

Error loading operating system

OlivierParis — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:03:54 GMT

Hello,

I'm new to VmWare and I've installed VmWare ESXi 4 on a physical server and connect a datastore on a Netapp appliance (FAS2050) via iSCSI.

All is working well.

Next step : Using VmWare vCenter Converter Standalone (4.0.1 build 161434), I've converted a Windows 2003 Server SP2 into a virtual machine on my ESXi server. The operation was successfull with no errors.

BUT : When I launch my virtual machine, it doesnt work and in the console, I have an error message : "Error loading operating system".

In attachment : a picture of the VM settings (automatically set byt the converter).

Any ideas ?

Thanks.

Olivier

Degraded service console network performance in ESX 4.0.... Is this fixed in ESX 4.0 Update 1?

tsadmin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:48:04 GMT

Is the degraded service console network performance problem (according to KB Article 1012159) fixed in ESX 4.0 Update 1?

Ernst

Vsphere Client & Windows 7

samuk — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:19:27 GMT

I get an error when i try to connect to the Vcentre server using the VI Client.

Error parsing the server "servername" "clients.xml" fil.
Login Will continue, contact your system administrator.

However connection still fails.

I am able to connect ok from the VI client from the Vcenter server itself.

Cant find iSCSI targets after reboot

Jimjames7 — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:36:17 GMT

I have a stange problem in ESX 4.0 where, after configuring a vSwitch with a VMKernel Port, Service Console Port and VM Port and then scanning the HBA for storage devices the connected devices on a MSA2012i SAN is discovered, however after rebooting the ESX server they are then lost and a rescan does not find them.

I have found that removing the vSwitch and then re-creating it again allows the volumes on the SAN to be discovered again only to be lost again after a reboot.

I have 2 ESX 3.5 servers which are configured with the same network setup although they are in their own cluster which do not have this problem.

Has anyone got any suggestions as to why this is occuring?

4TB SAN Storage Issue

vibranze — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:39:35 GMT

Dear All,

Recently my company just purchased an IBM BladeCenter H with 4GB Qlogic FC (QMI2572) and DS3400 (4TB). During the storage adding in ESX4, under Current Disk Layout, available capacity is only 90.85GB instead of total 4TB capacity stated.

I applied all the ESX4 patches, together with the latest Qlogic driver from VMware website without succeed.

Is this a known issue in ESX4 or rather than a configuration issue that I didn't aware of.

Now I'm going to installl ESX3.5U4 to see if the similar issue exists.

Your advice is highly appreciated.

Cheers!

ESXi U1 install

Josh26 — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:12:30 GMT

Hi,

I have attempted to install ESX 4i U1 to two existing servers, both build 175625.
One appeared to work and is now running build 208167.

The other however appears to have not changed its build number. The Host Update Utility scans it and decides it is "up to date".

Any advise appreciated.

Datastore unavailable

nasadmin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:33:46 GMT

Suppose if the Guest OS and data disks are on NFS datastore .Due to the NFS server outage if the vmkernel log says the datastore is lost connection to the NFS server what does it exactly mean. Is it from the management perspective or I/O perspective? What will happen to the I/O during this lost period? How does Guest OS react to this? When can I say that there is a loss of data?

Slow startup after upgrading VM Tools

nextlevel — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:22:44 GMT

I'm currently evaluating vSphere4 and i copied some VM from 3.5.

Everything work fine - until I've upgraded the VM Tools. After that, every VM (Windows 2003 Server) takes about ten times longer to boot up.

Even the I/O- Performance within the VM seems to be better than under 3.5, this fact does confusing me. And about 15 minutes to startup VM is too long anyway.

Does anyone has a clue about this problem?

Dell PE 6850 4 Dual CPU 3Ghz XEON 32Gb
Raid 5 an 4/DC
ESX 4.0.0, 171294

VM issues due to no rescan of HBA/VMFS volumes

steve31783 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:52:22 GMT

This morning I had our storage admin remove some old LUNs from my vsphere hosts. I got busy, and never rescanned the hosts/removed the LUNs on the ESX side. We started having issues today with VM performance, intermittent network connectivity loss on guests, etc. Looking through the vmkernel logs I immediately noticed the hosts were having storage issues, remembered I was supposed to rescan in the AM!

As soon as I rescanned, all problems were solved.

Im just curious if someone can explain why a vsphere host would have such an issue? I dont have this issue with ESX 3.X hosts....

iSCSI Failover Paths - Not seeing what I expected

DavidB403 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:29:20 GMT

Setup:

x2 Dell R410 ESXi 4 - x4 GbE Ports - all vSwitches have MTU 9000

x2 Dell PowerConnect 2816 - Jumbo Frames enabled

x1 MD3000i - All iSCSI ports have 9000 MTU - Out-of-band management

From what I have read, I should expect to see four paths for each LUN. Two active, two standby. This is exactly what I see on fecalesx01. But only two paths for each LUN on fecalesx02, one active and one standby. Can anyone tell me what might be our of place? I've scratched my head raw. Please use the screen captures for reference.

Once again: Can anyone tell me why I am not seeing four paths for each LUN on fecalesx02?

Thank you.

Client Device status is greyed out

Virtualizeit — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:08:12 GMT

When I connect to the ESX through the vic I try to enable my client device so I can access my cd rom and device status is grey and will not light up. I can connect to the host device fine if the CD is in the drive but not in my client drive

vcbmounter.exe speed

LarsOeschey — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:32:09 GMT

Hi,

I have written a script with the Perl CLI SDK to backup some VMs from our ESX servers. From within the script I'm using vcbmounter.exe with this commandline:

{quote} "c:\path\vcbmounter.exe -h vspherehost -u user -p password -a name:vmname -r w:\path\to\backup -t fullvm -F 0 -M 1 -m nbd"{/quote}

Now a 28Gb VM takes 80mins to backup, which seems a bit long for me. Converter only needs 28mins for it.

Can I somehow speed vcbmounter up? Do I use wrong/bad parameters?

Lars

(and what are the correct tags for code/quotes? There's no buttons in this editor...)

How to prevent VM failover of a SQL Clustered server, in a Clustered host enviroment

tklose — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:56:20 GMT

I have 4 Vsphere 4 enterprise hosts in a VM cluster.
I have a Active/Active Windows SQL cluster server (MSCS) accross 2 of my hosts.

In the event of a HOST failure, I do not want the other HOST to start up a specific VM guest.
I just want the VM to shut down and stay OFF.

Why?
In a MSCS cluster, some of the configuration is on the local host and it is using RAW luns (which are masked out on 2 hosts) .
I do not know what would occur if HA tried to move the VM in the event the HOST stops responding ( and don't wish to find out the hard way)
Because I am already protected in a VM guest cluster enviroment, I don't need failover/restart to occur.

Under the Cluster HA settings:
The 3 HA VM options for Power off VM, Leave VM powerd on, and Shutdown VM all move the VM and try to restart it.

When VM Restart Priorty is set to Disabled, does it prevent moving the host as well as preventing restart?

Please explain.

Monitor virtual machine filesystem consumption+ alarms!

larsrohdin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:29:40 GMT

Hi,

Found only old discussions about this, wanted to start a new.
Not sure if this is the correct forum, but Ill give it a try.

Question:
Is there any way (plugin, script, application) to monitor the disk consumptions of my vm filesystems?
And get alarms for them?

For example:
If C: reaches 75%, send warning email.
If /var reaches 90% send alert.

Found some apps for this, in this thread: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/162251
But they can not create alarms.

Any ideas?

Best Regards,
Lars Rohdin

HP AiO SB600c Storage in a C3000

samuk — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:11:33 GMT

Can i use this as ISCSI storage and present a LUN to multiple ESX 4 Hosts as shared storage?

New to this storage server - any help appriciated.

HP Virtual Connect versus HP ProCurve (blade switches) in a c7000?

hwangeruk — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:26:01 GMT

I'm agonizing whether to go with HP Virtual Connect or HP ProCurve blade switches in my c7000.

Has anyone else been in this position?

Not sure I need the complexity or granularity of Virtual Connect Flex 10.

Is ProCurve the strategic direction for HP?

I can get a 6120XG and just give each server 10Gig, trunk 4 x 10G uplinks, seems simple.
Yet HP are steering me to Virtual Connect.

Has anyone owned both and can give their opinion?

"Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error when trying to use a disk with vSphere Client

juanjoln — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:54:33 GMT

Hi all,

I have been searching the posts exhaustively but found no answear to this.

I am trying to access a virtual disk which is free (no machine uses it right now).

With that aim, I went to a VM, then clicked on Edit Settings --> Add hard disk --> use a disk

Then, when I am prompted for the disk, I select it and click ok.

When I click on "Next", the following message appears:

Object reference not set to an instance of an object

(it really appears in Spanish: Referencia a objeto no establecida como instancia de un objeto)

And then Next button appears as not-clickable.

Any suggestions?

It could be related to the .NET Framework, so I write here the versions which I have currently installed:

.NET Framework 2.0 SP1 LanguagePack

.NET Framework 2.0 SP2

.NET Framework 3.0 SP1 Language Pack

.NET Framework 3.0 SP2

.NET Framework 3.5 SP1

All these with hotfixes.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Juan J.

PS: I found there was information about VSphere Client and drivers misplaced. I already changed those:

%ROOTDRIVE%\%PROGRAMFILES%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher

Where I copied libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll

VMDKs not getting saved by VCBackup for V7 VMs

PACEDE — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:46:28 GMT

Hi there,

we did an upgrade from VI3 to vSphere4 a couple of weeks ago.
This week I created some new vms which now are version 7 vms.
Those vms are running great and haven't got any problems.

One drawback is, that we're no longer able to creat VCBackups from those V7 machines, because the VMDKs won't get saved.
The only files getting backed up are .log, .vmx, .vram and .da.

Here is what VCbackup logs:

~~2009-11-19 11:12:33.978 'App' 684 info~~ Current working directory: D:\Jobs\VCBBackup
~~2009-11-19 11:12:33.978 'BaseLibs' 684 info~~ HOSTINFO: Seeing Intel CPU, numCoresPerCPU 4 numThreadsPerCore 1.
~~2009-11-19 11:12:33.978 'BaseLibs' 684 info~~ HOSTINFO: This machine has 1 physical CPUS, 4 total cores, and 4 logical CPUs.
~~2009-11-19 11:12:34.447 'BaseLibs' 684 info~~ Using system libcrypto, version 90709F
Copying "_CX_Oracle_02 BERVM09A16/BERVM09A16.vmx":
+ 0%=====================50%=====================100%+
+ **************************************************+

Copying "_CX_Oracle_02 BERVM09A16/BERVM09A16.nvram":
+ 0%=====================50%=====================100%+
+ **************************************************+

Copying "_CX_Oracle_02 BERVM09A16//vmware-7.log":
+ 0%=====================50%=====================100%+
+ **************************************************+

Copying "_CX_Oracle_02 BERVM09A16//vmware-2.log":
+ 0%=====================50%=====================100%+
+ **************************************************+

Copying "_CX_Oracle_02 BERVM09A16//vmware-3.log":
+ 0%=====================50%=====================100%+
+ **************************************************+

Copying "_CX_Oracle_02 BERVM09A16//vmware-4.log":
+ 0%=====================50%=====================100%+
+ **************************************************+

Copying "_CX_Oracle_02 BERVM09A16//vmware-5.log":
+ 0%=====================50%=====================100%+
+ **************************************************+

Copying "_CX_Oracle_02 BERVM09A16//vmware-6.log":
+ 0%=====================50%=====================100%+
+ **************************************************+

Copying "_CX_Oracle_02 BERVM09A16//vmware.log":
+ 0%=====================50%=====================100%+
+ **************************************************+

We are using this command to initiate the backup:

vcbmounter.exe -h vcenter.ourcompany.local -u backup -p ultrasecurepassword -a name:%1 -r "E:\VCBBACKUP\TODAY\%DATE%_%1" -t fullvm -L 2 > D:\Jobs\VCBBackup\VCBLog\%date%\%1.txt

Older VMs are getting backed up without any problems.
Have you got any suggestions?

Regards,
John

All VMkernel ports lose connectivity when disconnecting pNic of first vmkernel port.

Remko N — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:07:03 GMT

Hello,

We are setting up 4 VMkernel ports with a 1:1 mapping with physical nics for use with iSCSI Software Initiator multipathing. But we experience an unacceptable issue disconnecting the FIRST vmnic. Not only the vmkernel port of the disconnected vmnic loses connectivity, but EVERY other vmkernel port. When disconnecting any other vmnic, everything works as expected (only the vmkernel port of the disconnected vmnic loses connectivity, all the others keep working).

We've tried many different things, for example changing from Intel NIC's to Broadcom; but the issue is not resolved. We've followed the steps as descibed in iSCSI SAN Configuration Guide.

The issue is very easy to reproduce. What we have done in a small test:

We've created a standard vSwitch, containing 2 vmkernel ports and 2 physical nics:
vmk0 (10.228.0.43); active adapter: vmnic0, unused adapter vmnic1
vmk1 (10.228.0.44); active adapter: vmnic1, unused adapter vmnic0.

When disconnecting vmnic0; neither IP addresses are pingable. When disconnecting vmnic1 we only lose vmk1 as expected, vmk0 keeps on working. No matter how many nics we assign, every vmkernel goes down when disconnecting vmnic0. This is a huge single point of failure.

What are we missing here? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Copying VM or Templates from one datastore to another

alasdair.carnie — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:27:35 GMT

Hi all,

I need to be able to check for the existance of a particular VM Template on a datastore and then if it is are not there, transfer a copy of it from a secure datastore.

I started out with just trying to copy the entire content of a datastore from one to another, but have now coded myself into a corner. As my programming skills are limited I am probably missing something very simple.

Any help would be as always much appreciated. I have attached the script I have so far.

#Add VMware Powershell Cmdlets
Add-PSSnapin -Name Vmware.VimAutomation.Core

Connect to Infrastructure vCenter

Connect-VIServer -Server vc-overview.qavdc.com -User administrator -Password vmware
Write-Host “Connected to VirtualCenter ($vc)”

function CopyDirectory( $dc, $source, $dest ) {
$vmhost = Get-VMHost | Get-View
$browser = Get-View $vmhost[0].DatastoreBrowser

$spec = New-Object VMware.Vim.HostDatastoreBrowserSearchSpec
$spec.MatchPattern = "*"
$spec.Details.fileType = $true

$srcf = $browser.SearchDatastore( $source, $spec )
foreach( $srcfile in $srcf ) {
Write-Output $srcfile
}
}

$dc = Get-Datacenter "Training"

CopyDirectory( $dc, 'SharedTMPLs', 'SharedVMs' )

When I run this code I get the following error.

Property 'fileType' cannot be found on this object; make sure it exists and is settable.
At :line:14 char:15
+ $spec.Details. <<<< fileType = $true

the authenticity of vendor certified hardware/software

dnetz — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:19:32 GMT

Hi,

About six months ago, we bought two Sun Storage 7410 appliances for use with ESX 3.5. Since the Storage 7000 series software was still very much in development back then, we went straight for the latest release, the 2009 software release, and immediately hit huge problems with NFS. The storage machines would stop responding and lock up completely. No biggie we thought, Vmware said that ESX 3.5 and Storage 7000 was only certified for the 2008 software release so we downgraded and things were fine. Now a whole host of other problems arose with the 2008 software release and at the same time we were upgrading to ESX 4. The Vmware HCL listed the 2009 release as compatible with ESX 4, but here's the kicker, to work properly you have to alter a low level system variable that is neither documented anywhere or in any way communicated by Sun unless a support case is opened. This bug is a complete showstopper for running ESX on the Storage 7000 series and is very easily replicated, since all you need to do to trigger it is create a moderate load and start svMotioning a machine.

So my question is, what kind of certification process does the hardware vendors now go through since Vmware has let them do this on their own and how is it possible to let software with this kind of bug get certified? It has cost us a whole hell of a lot of money and made us doubt the entire certification process for hardware.

As a side note, we're now abandoning the Storage 7000 series for Netapp until their software and support organization has proven ready for a production environment.

Ps. This is in now way critique on Vmware's products, they've worked flawlessly.

XP Virtual Machine stops responding frequently on ESXi 4.0

appetite — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:08:34 GMT

We have two XP VMs both on different hosts. The xp virtual machines stops responding frequently. I will be able to ping but cannot connect remotely.
Using VI client if I try to connect to VM console it says "Error connecting to existing session for user (Id 0). A device attached to the system is not functioning". Also the below lines are seen on VM log file,

Nov 19 06:01:01.839: vmx| GuestRpcSendTimedOut: message to toolbox timed out.
Nov 19 06:01:01.839: vmx| GuestRpc: app toolbox's second ping timeout; assuming app is down.

If restarted it starts working normally but it will end up with the same issues after few days.

Storage nightmare or overlooked solution?

shadoh10006 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:41:00 GMT

I have the following setup

R710 (native SQL)

R900 (ESXi)vsphere

MD1000 Storage

And heres my issue!

THe SQL server must remain native for configuration purposes. The R900 is hosting "worker" vm's that are processing jobs handed out by the SQL server. the workers finish the processing and then report back to SQL all the results and save completed documents and data on the MD1000...

Currently the R710 SQL server and MD1000 are attached via SAS. The R900 and SQL server are attached via a switch and 4x1GB connections.

The workers must rely on SQL to serve them access to the MD1000 and thus creating a HUGE bottleneck including approx 50-90 ms latency between the VM and datastore.

Wishful thinking i would like to direct attach the R900 to the MD1000 keeping all the data to be processed and already processed here...I am planning on having a RAID10 setup on the MD100 for performance and reliability.

What i cant figure out is how to access the MD1000 once it is attached to the R900? should i use RDM? VMFS? NFS?

All Comments/criticism welcome !

vDR not seeing new cluster

fgl — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:14:45 GMT

I created a new cluster (2 hosts) under the same datacenter as my other cluster (6 hosts) but for some reason the vDR does not see the new cluster as it doesn't even show up on the list to choose from. I've already tried rebooting the vDR appliance and the vCenter VM. Anyone else experienced this?

vSphere Host Update Utility Scan Failed

inasol — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:30:50 GMT

Hi everyone,

I've recently upgraded my Dell PE2950iii ESXi 3.5 Embedded to 4.0. After the upgrade I was unable to patch the host after successfully scanning and downloading the 2 available patches. I then decided (after reading a user's post) I decided to run the Repair option on the ESXi 4 CD. The repair went through fine without any visible errors. Now that I am attempting scan and patch my host, I get an error which referred me to an viu-3 log file. I'm not to clear on how to read it but I managed to locate this piece of info that may be valuable in determining what is at fault in my setup.

VIU :QuickInf 2009-11-18 17:10:15.328 msg: hostCacheManager, 50 cache location: /tmp/updatecache cache size: 260408MB
VIU :QuickInf 2009-11-18 17:10:15.328 msg: Host scanner wrapper: scanning(all) started.
VIU :QuickInf 2009-11-18 17:10:15.328 inf: Managed patch manager using metadata URLs:
VIU :QuickInf 2009-11-18 17:10:15.328 inf: Start uploading files to host
VIU :QuickInf 2009-11-18 17:10:15.328 inf: Event posted: Start uploading files to host
VIU :QuickInf 2009-11-18 17:10:15.328 inf: Upload file: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VI Update/vmw/metadata/vmw-ESXi-4.0.0-metadata.zip to: /tmp/updatecache/vmw-ESXi-4.0.0-metadata.zip
VIU :QuickInf 2009-11-18 17:10:15.328 inf: Managed patch manager uploading file, src: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VI Update/vmw/metadata/vmw-ESXi-4.0.0-metadata.zip, dst: /tmp/updatecache/vmw-ESXi-4.0.0-metadata.zip
VIU :QuickInf 2009-11-18 17:10:15.328 msg: Host scanner wrapper scanning(all) failed [2]: I/O error occurred. Failure details: System.IO.IOException: I/O error occurred.

Can someone please advise me on how to proceed?

Help resource pools disappearing

cookieme — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:01:58 GMT

I rebooted my ESXi host and when it came back up and I launched the vClient, I noticed that some of my resource pools had disappeared! I have three pools to help with organisation as I only have a single host and thus no vCenter. This has never happened before and I have had this host running for several months. When I looked at the Events tab I saw the following message:

"Configuration file for cannot be found"

It does not say "for" what!

Is something corrupt? How worried do I need to be?

Thanks

Command menu shows only "Power On" and "Edit Settings"

dekiblue — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:24:47 GMT

Hi,

Yesterday I installed ESX 4.0 in order to evaluate it. I know that VMWare workstation has an option to convert VM to template so I tried to do that in ESX. Well, I'm rather new in this virtualization thing but I can't find Convert to Template - actually, I found it but it's in the Commands list only when I enter Maintanance Mode after starting vSphere Client for the fist time. If I exit maintanance mode and go back again, the Commands area of any VM does not show all theCammand it did before. Anyway, how can I enable all those commands that I can see only gray?

Thanks

Dejan

VCB error

mach03 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:32:59 GMT

hello we are using a script in the crontab that is backing up the virt. machine to a nfs volume
for a long time a works very fine since last weekend different esx hosts (3.5 update 4) shows
an error that the vmx-file contains unknow virtualhw.version = "4"

17:45:08: (BACKUP) FEHLER - unbekannte vHW(=) bei /vmfs/volumes/4aa7bfbd-4298d3e2-accc-001cc4467212/WNPQT001/WNPQT001.vmx

example of vmx file that is not working

#!/usr/bin/vmware
config.version = "8"
displayName = "WNPQT001"
sched.cpu.shares = "normal"
memSize = "3600"
sched.mem.shares = "normal"
guestOS = "winnetstandard"
scsi0.present = "true"
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
scsi0:0.present = "true"
scsi0:0.name = "WNPQT001.vmdk"
ethernet0.present = "true"
ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet"
ethernet0.connectionType = "monitor_dev"
ide0:0.present = "true"
ide0:0.deviceType = "atapi-cdrom"
ide0:0.fileName = "auto detect"
ide0:0.startConnected = "FALSE"
powertype.reset = "default"
powertype.poweroff = "default"
powertype.poweron = "default"
draw = "gdi"
ethernet0.generatedaddress = "00:50:56:8e:28:f7"
uuid.bios = "50 21 00 2d 1e 35 a4 5e-0a d5 91 f9 32 cf 0b 78"
checkpoint.cptconfigname = "WNPQT001.vmss"
floppy0.startconnected = "false"
priority.ungrabbed = "normal"
uuid.location = "56 4d e8 5c f6 62 ac a3-4e b2 56 c5 ea 25 e7 d2"
suspend.directory = "."
ethernet0.addresstype = "vpx"
ethernet0.networkname = "VLAN_736"
priority.grabbed = "normal"
usb.present = "false"
floppy0.filename = "/dev/fd0"
virtualhw.version = "4"
powertype.suspend = "default"
isolation.tools.dnd.disable = "true"
tools.syncTime = "FALSE"

scsi0:1.present = "true"
scsi0:1.name = "WNPQT001_1.vmdk"
scsi0:1.deviceType = "scsi-hardDisk"

numvcpus = "2"

scsi0:0.deviceType = "scsi-hardDisk"
ide0:0.autodetect = "true"
extendedConfigFile = "WNPQT001.vmxf"
virtualHW.productCompatibility = "hosted"
tools.upgrade.policy = "manual"

scsi0:0.redo = ""
scsi0:1.redo = ""
scsi0:0.mode = "persistent"
scsi0:1.mode = "persistent"
nvram = "WNPQT001.nvram"
sched.cpu.units = "mhz"
scsi0:0.fileName = "WNPQT001.vmdk"
scsi0:1.fileName = "WNPQT001_1.vmdk"

guestOSAltName = "Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition (32-Bit)"
sched.cpu.affinity = "all"
toolScripts.afterPowerOn = "true"
toolScripts.afterResume = "true"
toolScripts.beforeSuspend = "true"
toolScripts.beforePowerOff = "true"

annotation = "Logon Portal Evaluierung"
migrate.hostlog = "./WNPQT001.vmss.hlog"
sched.cpu.min = "0"
sched.mem.minsize = "0"
sched.mem.max = "3600"
sched.swap.derivedName = "/vmfs/volumes/4aa7bfbd-4298d3e2-accc-001cc4467212/WNPQ T001/WNPQT001.vmss.vswp"
hostCPUID.0 = "0000000168747541444d416369746e65"
guestCPUID.0 = "0000000168747541444d416369746e65"
userCPUID.0 = "0000000168747541444d416369746e65"
hostCPUID.1 = "00020f120002080000000001178bfbff"
guestCPUID.1 = "00020f120000080000000001078bbbff"
userCPUID.1 = "00020f120002080000000001078bbbff"
hostCPUID.80000001 = "00020f1200000e4600000002e3d3fbff"
guestCPUID.80000001 = "00020f1200000e4600000000e3d3fbff"
userCPUID.80000001 = "00020f1200000e4600000000e3d3fbff"
evcCompatibilityMode = "FALSE"

RHEL5.3 64-bit guest: esxtop shows intermittent 100% DRPRX

stensness — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:07:20 GMT

Hello,

I have a couple of RHEL5.2 64-bit guests on a 3-node vSphere cluster (all build 164009) with 2 vCPUs and 8Gb RAM each. They have two virtual NICs using the E1000 driver. Each virtual NIC is connected to a separate vSwitch with VLANs defined. They have VMwareTools installed.

The guests are running apache with PHP. The application behind apache is talking to an Oracle database (actually two Oracle databases in a DataGuard configuration, but that's another story). Each RHEL5 guest also mounts an NFSv3 shared directory from an external server.

I'm noticing that the web service provided by these machines is a lot slower than a similar physical machine. As part of my troubleshooting process in trying to find out why they are a lot slower, I've noticed that there are, intermittently, values of 100% in the '%DRPRX' column in esxtop for one of the two virtual network devices for the VM. However, none of the four physical NICs that are teamed to this vSwitch show any dropped packets in esxtop:

50331650 vmnic4 - vSwitch2 3058.38 6.14 2873.51 6.14 0.00 0.00
50331651 vmnic5 - vSwitch2 21.91 0.08 227.90 0.53 0.00 0.00
50331652 vmnic6 - vSwitch2 3.39 0.04 16.73 0.02 0.00 0.00
50331653 vmnic7 - vSwitch2 8.37 0.04 13.35 0.01 0.00 0.00
50331654 4290:mdl0ap0 all(4) vSwitch2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.00
50331655 4290:mdl0ap0 all(4) vSwitch2 3092.05 6.30 3091.65 6.77 0.00 0.13

Does anyone know what this means? Is it normal? Anyone else seeing it with Linux/RHEL5 guests?

Thanks...

Citrix Merchandising Server 1.1 in ESX

MarkWare — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:42:50 GMT

I am currently looking for a way to run the new Citrix Merchandising Server 1.1 in ESX. Anyone have a suggestion?

Path Selection for PS6000XV Equallogic array

stevesimoes — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:20:10 GMT

I have done everything mentioned here: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/03/18/iscsi-multipathing-with-esxcliexploring-the-next-version-of-esx/
and this matches up with what is in the official iSCSI VMware guide. I
see the 2 paths to my Test LUN. I see Storage Array Type VMW_SATP_EQL
which tells me ESX knows the array it is connected to and picked the
best SATP setting. I also see that it defaulted to Fixed (VMware) for
the Path Selection, and this is what I am not sure about. Do I keep it
set to Fixed, or do I switch it to Most Recently Used or Round Robin?
What confuses me is that the documentation warns against the risk of
path thrashing, yet I have an iSCSI array with one active controller
and one in standby mode (Dell uses the term standby, not passive), and
all the talk about path thrashing centers on having 2 storage
processors competing for one LUN. Since I seem to understand that is
not possible, should I not be concerned about path thrashing? Would I
then just keep it at Fixed? Or are there riskless benefits to using MRU
or Round Robin?

ESX 4.0 build number did not change

uxmax1976 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:59:19 GMT

hello

I just installed 6 patches including a kernel but even after a reboot the build number is still the same (vmware esx 4.0 175626) (details esx host via vcenter)
regarding the patch release the build number should have changed to something like 193498

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1014078

~~root@esxhost ~~~# esxupdate query
----Bulletin ID---- -----Installed----- -------------Summary-------------
ESX400-200906412-BG 2009-08-25T14:04:09 Updates esxupdate
ESX400-200906405-SG 2009-08-25T14:04:09 Updates krb5 and pam_krb5
ESX400-200907401-BG 2009-08-25T14:04:09 Updates vmklinux and vmkernel64
ESX400-200906406-SG 2009-08-25T14:04:09 Updates sudo
ESX400-200906402-BG 2009-08-25T14:04:09 Updates ESX Scripts
ESX400-200906407-SG 2009-08-25T14:04:09 Updates curl
ESX400-200906404-BG 2009-08-25T14:04:09 Updates CIM
ESX400-200906408-BG 2009-08-25T14:04:09 Updates SCSI Driver for QLogic FC
ESX400-200906409-BG 2009-08-25T14:04:09 Updates LSI storelib Library
ESX400-200906411-SG 2009-08-25T14:04:09 Updates udev
ESX400-200906413-BG 2009-08-25T14:04:09 Updates vmkernel iSCSI Driver
ESX400-200909404-BG 2009-11-18T13:28:32 Updates ixgbe
ESX400-200909401-BG 2009-11-18T13:28:32 Updates vmx and vmkernel64
ESX400-200909403-BG 2009-11-18T13:28:32 Updates bnx2x
ESX400-200909402-BG 2009-11-18T13:28:32 Updates VMware Tools
ESX400-200909406-BG 2009-11-18T13:28:32 Updates hpsa
ESX400-200909405-BG 2009-11-18T13:28:32 Updates perftools

the output of "vmware -v" is more confusing

vmware -v
VMware ESX 4.0.0 build-164009

Do you have any experience about that. Thanks a lot!

rgds, uxmax

Updated MS network load balancing guidelines for vsphere?

foxy1977 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:36:42 GMT

Hi there,

I am trying to find out if there is an updated version for the microsoft network load balancing guidelines for v4. The only one i can find is this one for v3:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/implmenting_ms_network_load_balancing.pdf

I have previously managed to get this up and running on v3 esxi without any problems. I have managed to get a NLB cluster up and running on two servers but i am experiencing weird network connectivity issues. I just want to check my configuration up against the recommendations/guidelines and rule out any NLB configuration problems.

To programitically get the details of ESX Server using VI SDK 4

newsharon86 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:50:52 GMT

Hi All,

I have a doubt how to programitically get the details of ESX Server using VI SDK 4

I have installed VI SDK 4 , but dont know which method to use to get details of ESX Server

Kindly help me out if any one has solution to this doubt.

vmware-hostd use the module from /lib or /lib64?

olano — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:38:11 GMT

Hi,
I found a trick thing when I configured ESX server 4.0.
We configure ESX to support AD account integration using Kerberos for authentication and LDAP for authorization. The problem is in one line in the /etc/pam.d/system-auth file, We add a line
"auth required /lib64/security/pam_listfile.so onerr=fail item=group sense=allow file=/etc/groups.allow" to control the users and groups that have ssh access to the server.

Because ESX4.0 is for 64bit, we use modules from /lib64. After the configuration, we can use ssh to login the server by our own AD account. But Logining the ESX server by vsphere client failed. The log is below:

Nov 18 14:15:21 tsgdvmsomc13 /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-hostd6655: PAM unable to dlopen(/lib64/security/pam_listfile.so)
Nov 18 14:15:21 tsgdvmsomc13 /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-hostd6655: PAM ~~error: /lib64/security/pam_listfile.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64~~
Nov 18 14:15:21 tsgdvmsomc13 /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-hostd6655: PAM adding faulty module: /lib64/security/pam_listfile.so

What does it mean? it means the module from /lib64 is wrong module? the vmware-hostd need use the 32bit module? So I change to use /lib/security/pam_listfile.so. This time, the login to ESX by vsphere client success, but I can't login server by AD account any more due to adding faulty module.... The ssh and vsphere client use the different modules ? One for 64bit, other for 32bit?
Is there anyone can fix this issue?

Lan

a general system error occurred the virtual machine could not start

b1izzard — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:49:40 GMT

I just tried firing up a Windows 2008 virtual machine and got the above message. I haven't changed anything, and it was working fine the last time I tried it. I did lose power and it did an improper shutdown, but hopefully these virtual machines aren't that sensitive. I can't find any information on this error. Anyone run into this or know of a workaround?

HELP! MD3000i and vSphere4 connectivity issue

duranduran — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:10:41 GMT

Hi,

I am having a very serious connectivity issue between my esx 4 hosts and my md3000i. My hosts randomly drop and reconnect to storage several times an hour, which causes some of my CentOS 4/5 vms to crash. The odd thing is that it it doesn't affect all the vms, only one or two randomly. My setup is

6 ESX 4 hosts (4 our Dell blades in split between two chassis, two are dell 1950s) with 4 nic ports, 2 for storage and 2 for service console, virtual machines)
2 md3000is (one to host all vms, one to host replicas created by veeam backup. hosts are connected to both)
MPIO is enabled, so I have two vmkernels, each with one active nic and bound to the software iscsi initiator
The Service console, vmkernels, and storage are all on the same vlan (not best practice)

I get the following errors

Successfully restored access to volume
4aa6ec80-716f1788-5306-001018591318
(VM_Storage_B) following connectivity issues.
info
11/18/2009 7:05:00 AM

Successfully restored access to volume
4aa6ecac-4598154a-3808-001018591318
(VM_Storage_C) following connectivity issues.
info
11/18/2009 7:05:00 AM

Lost access to volume
4aa6ec80-716f1788-5306-001018591318
(VM_Storage_B) due to connectivity issues.
Recovery attempt is in progress and outcome will
be reported shortly.
info
11/18/2009 7:05:00 AM

Lost access to volume
4aa6ecac-4598154a-3808-001018591318
(VM_Storage_C) due to connectivity issues.
Recovery attempt is in progress and outcome will
be reported shortly.
info
11/18/2009 7:05:00 AM

Can anyone please help? I have tried changing the queue depth on the esx hosts, but to no avail. I am tearing my hair out!

Thank you,

K

ESXi 4.0 Storage Question

chontay — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:17:45 GMT

Hi All

New to ESXi and still testing.

I have a machine I want to use as the host. It has a 1.8TB SATA hardware RAID in it. If I build this machine as the host, can I attach the container as storage but retain the data on it to attach to a guest as a physical disk? When I've added storage on other test machines it always formats it and I don't want to do that if I can help it.

I can do this with Hyper-V simply by taking the disk offline in Windows and then it is presented as an available device to any guest I wish to attach it to. But I can't see this in ESXi.

I also have several other disks Mirrored etc which I would use to install ESX to so this wouldn't be the only storage available to the Host/Guests.

Thanks in advance.

Rob

Problems enabling PCI passthrough on an MSI X58m whitebox

oschistad — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:31:55 GMT

I recently upgraded my whitebox ESX at home with an Intel i920 and a MSI X58M motherboard. From what I've gathered, VT-D should be available on this system but the Advanced Settings page of the ESX still says that the host does not support passthrough. This is rather depressing since I was really hoping to play around with this feature.

Now, I suspect that the real culprit here is the BIOS - aparently many of the motherboards shipping with this chipset claim VT-D support but lack a BIOS capable of setting up the required ACPI tables, however MSI themselves have claimed that enabling "VT" in the BIOS should also enable VT-D.

Anyway; Curious to hear wether anyone else have managed to get PCI passthrough working using non-server hardware. Or if I am missing some vital bit of information..

ESXi 3.5 to 4.X using Vsphere Host Update Utility

Chicagojsh001 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:16:47 GMT

Hello World!
So I decided today that I would attempt to do an upgrade from 3.5 to 4.0 on my test server. I downloaded the upgrade ZIP file from the 4.0 downloads area.

I found these instructions: http://vm-help.com/esx40i/ESXi40_upgrade_without_virtualcenter.php on how to upgrade without Virutal Center. Everywhere says the same thing....extract the 4.0 client from the zip file, install it with the option for Vsphere host update utility(done and done).
Launch the ulility, select your host, select upgrade(done done done), in the host window select the zip file as the source package...DOAH!!

The utility only gives me the option for ISO not .ZIP.....sooo....I"m stuck..I must be doing something wrong I guess....or something has changed. it's kind of annoying though to download an almost 300 meg zip file, then find out I have no way to use it?...

I can only assume I'm missing a step..is there another VMWare Vsphere Host Update Utility that will let me use the .zip file for the upgrade? Am I supposed to be launching it with a switch of some sort?

I"m running the utility on a windows XP machine if that makes any difference.

Thanks
Josh

VM disk usage and datastore report

kwharrisit — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:18:38 GMT

I am trying to figure out the best method to get the following:

Name of VM
Size of D: Drive (both preallocated and actually used)
cluster or resource pool the VM belongs to
Datastore where VM resides.

I have been messing with various storage reports that give me VM to datastore mapping, but I need something that will look at the used space within the VM and report that as well. This is all to go into an excel spreadsheet to begin a capacity planning presentation.

HELP!

Path Selection for PS6000XV Equallogic array

stevesimoes — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:13:32 GMT

I have done everything mentioned here: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/03/18/iscsi-multipathing-with-esxcliexploring-the-next-version-of-esx/ and this matches up with what is in the official iSCSI VMware guide. I see the 2 paths to my Test LUN. I see Storage Array Type VMW_SATP_EQL which tells me ESX knows the array it is connected to and picked the best SATP setting. I also see that it defaulted to Fixed (VMware) for the Path Selection, and this is what I am not sure about. Do I keep it set to Fixed, or do I switch it to Most Recently Used or Round Robin? What confuses me is that the documentation warns against the risk of path thrashing, yet I have an iSCSI array with one active controller and one in standby mode (Dell uses the term standby, not passive), and all the talk about path thrashing centers on having 2 storage processors competing for one LUN. Since I seem to understand that is not possible, should I not be concerned about path thrashing? Would I then just keep it at Fixed? Or are there riskless benefits to using MRU or Round Robin?

ESXi is reporting that VM's are using excessive amounts of physical resources.

doepain — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:12:58 GMT

Our vSphere Client reports that VM's guests are utilizing more resources tha they actually when you go to the actual Guest and check its resources they are relatively idle.

When reboot the VM that was using almost 97% of its allocated memory its released the memory back into the the pool, but as soon as it came back online it immediately grabbed the full amount it was assigned ...eventually it leveled off back to 35%.

Then another system decided it wanted to consume nearly 90% of its resources.

The VM's them selve (through TaskManager) are barely doing anything.

Senior Hosting Engineer
ModusLink Open Channel Solutions, Inc.

Can't delete File from LUN

prutter — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:40:53 GMT

I'm trying to remove a LUN from VC and there is an FLP file that says is in use. i can't find any vm that is using it but i can't remove the LUN until i clear that file. Is there an easy way to find out what has that file open and clear is so i can remove the LUN?

Tape Library and ESXi4

vash2009 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:31:04 GMT

Hello,

We have a Dell TL4000 (Tape Library – 2 Drives) connected directly with a ESXi4, in the Configuration Tab->Storage Adapters, the vmhba3 show the LUN`s 0 and 1 but one of them is “Dead” (see the .jpg)

LUN 0 -> IBM Fibre Channel Tape (Dead)
LUN 1 -> IBM Fibre Channel Medium Changer (Active)

Actually using drivers, “lin_taped-1.27.0-1” and “lin_tape-1.27.0-1”.

Somebody can tell me if it is because of the ESXi 4, drivers or something else?

Thanks!

windows 2003 "stalls" in ESXi4.0 from hp

AlbertM — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:22:19 GMT

Good afternoon, everyone.
Can anybody help me with such problem?

I've installed ESXi 4.0 from HP on DL360 G5 box, and Windows 2003 standard with SP2. Everything worked fine for some days, but later next things began to occure:
1. System (I'm talking about windows) freezes for a minute or two occasionally, nor workload or user actions do not affect on this.
All network connections to this host drop because of timeout. Image in "Virtual machine display" (i.e. "Console" tab) freezes for the same period too. All other tabs of ESXi, including performance tabs work as followed.
2. Pinging this computer shows the following:

...
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=55 ttl=128 time=0.316 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=56 ttl=128 time=0.223 ms
system have stalled at this moment
From 192.168.99.2 icmp_seq=91 Destination Host Unreachable
...
From 192.168.99.2 icmp_seq=113 Destination Host Unreachable
system have come back
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=57 ttl=128 time=59450 ms <-something strange
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=58 ttl=128 time=58450 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=59 ttl=128 time=57450 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=60 ttl=128 time=56451 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=61 ttl=128 time=55451 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=62 ttl=128 time=54450 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=63 ttl=128 time=53449 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=64 ttl=128 time=52449 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=65 ttl=128 time=51450 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=66 ttl=128 time=50450 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=67 ttl=128 time=49450 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=68 ttl=128 time=48449 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=69 ttl=128 time=47450 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=70 ttl=128 time=46450 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=71 ttl=128 time=45450 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=72 ttl=128 time=44450 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=73 ttl=128 time=43451 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=74 ttl=128 time=42451 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=75 ttl=128 time=41451 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=76 ttl=128 time=40451 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=77 ttl=128 time=39452 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=78 ttl=128 time=38452 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=79 ttl=128 time=37452 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=80 ttl=128 time=36452 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=81 ttl=128 time=35453 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=82 ttl=128 time=34453 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=83 ttl=128 time=33453 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=84 ttl=128 time=32453 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=85 ttl=128 time=31454 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=86 ttl=128 time=30454 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=87 ttl=128 time=29454 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=88 ttl=128 time=28453 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=89 ttl=128 time=27452 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=90 ttl=128 time=26453 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=114 ttl=128 time=2450 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=115 ttl=128 time=1450 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=116 ttl=128 time=450 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.99.13: icmp_seq=117 ttl=128 time=0.373 ms

It seems that almost all pings reached this windows host and it worked all this time. But all network

3. Besides of all above, I've found that all windows applications in this host "continue" to work during this stalls. For example, Windows Performance Monitor draws its diagrams as usual.

Any idea?

NIC functions of Neterion x3100 does not appear in BIOS boot list of ESXi 4.0

oneconv — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:37:20 GMT

Hi,

I have a neterion x3100 10Gb ethernet server adapter configured in multi function mode (8 functions) and PXE boot is enabled on the card. I have assigned a NIC

function of Neterion to the VM in pass-through mode. But I am not finding this assigned function on the BIOS boot order list of VM. Can anyone suggest me if I am missing something here.

Note: NIC functions of Neterion are shown in the BIOS boot order list if I keep same card on the standard PC.

Thanks & Regards,

Ramu

Error when trying to move VM from Lun to Lun in datastore view

koljen — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:02:31 GMT

When I try to move a vm from one LUN to antother in the datastore view just by "drag and drop" function in my VI client, I do get a error message:

The requested Storage VMotion would simultaneously change both a virtual machine's storage placement and its execution host; however, this is not supportert on the Soource host xxx..

The problem is that I only try to change storage location on the VM, not the host placement.

If I right click the VM and select migrate, and then select change datastore, everything works OK.
Just for the fun of it in the Datastore view I tried to "drag and drop" the VM to the same LUN/storage as its currently on. This worked just fine.

The environment I'm testing on is vSphere enterprise with ESX 4 hosts and VM with HW v 7.

Someone got an idea why this happens?

ESXi 4 Windows 2003/2008 Guests Random Freeze on DL360 G5

pixelblender — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:22:23 GMT

Hi,

We have strange issue regarding some guests OS on our ESXi 4. For no reason some guests randomly locked up/freeze for every 5 to 10 min. During freeze it's totally stops. Console view from vSphere is freezing, the machine is not reachable by ping, Remote Desktop dropped, etc. As if it stops processing everything temporary. What's really strange that it only happens on Windows (we tried 2003 32bit and 2008 64bit) and Fedora 10 64bit. Ubuntu 9.10 Server 64bit runs just fine.

Here's what we have:

VMWare ESXi 4.0 patched to latest update running on HP ProLiant DL360 G5 with Dual Quadcore (8 cores) Intel Xeon L5420 @ 2.5 GHz and 16GB of RAM (2GB taken for 10GbE HBA so 14GB available to ESXi). In this Machine we have 1GbE (HP NC373i), 10GbE HBA (HP NC522SFP+) and FC HBA (HP FC2242SR) connected to EV440.

Here are some guest OS that we have:

Windows 2003 32bit and Windows 2008 64bit. Randomly hang for every 5 to
10 minutes. Log from MMC says nothing at all. During freeze it
basically stops processing. Console view just hang, remote desktop got
disconnected, machine cannot be pinged.

Ubuntu 9.10 Server. Act as internet router/gateway, OpenLDAP server, Samba & NFS server. No X installed. everything works just fine. But as soon as i try to install basic x server with fluxbox on it, that random hang happens again. same symptoms.

CentOS 5.4 with x server installed and it works just fine.

Fedora 10 64bit with x server installed. Randomly hang and same symptoms, but this time it throws error saying: "clocksource tsc unstable". browsing around reveals issue with acpi that how linux kernel trying to clockdown the machine whenever it's not in heavy usage (i guess kinda like speedstep?). tried so many different method (changing clocksource, passing noacpi or acpi=no to kernel) and still having the same issue. In the end i just got rid of it and replace it with CentOS 5.4

I'm not really sure what's happening here. From what happened with Fedora i can tell maybe acpi causes issue here? i tried to disable acpi from the BIOS but it causes issue with ESXi (not having detected proper number of CPU cores, etc).

Please help,

best regards,

Pietra

DL360 G3 and Dl360 G4

TechKev — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:43:26 GMT

HI everyone,

I recently downloaded ESXi 3.5 and 4.0. Here is my questions;

3.5 installs nicely on the DL360 G3 - No CDrom support, so I can't install anything after that. I have tried both USB drives, USB, harddrives everything, nothing seems to show up at all.

4.0 insatlls nicely on the DL360 G4 will not install on the DL360 G3 (Understandable) and provides everything. USB support, CDrom etc.

I did read some post regarding that the ESXi doesn't support the CDroms and having to add new SCSI hardware for it to work. Well that didn't work for the DL360 G3, still have nothing, can't access the Datastore either to even load some of the ISO. I know option of using client CDrom to install software, which I guess is fine, but I was hoping to find a soluation to the issue, if there is one out there. I am also assuming it might have something to do with the BIOS needing updates, but not sure.

Does anyone run the ESXi on these servers that I could chitchat with?

Kevin

Pro grammatically deploying a virtual machine to Data Center A from a template in Data Center B

jswager1 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:11:18 GMT

I've seen several discussions saying that it's not possible to deploy a virtual machine to a particular data center from a template that was stored in a separate data center - even though both data centers were managed by the same Virtual Center. The error most often associated with this failure was "the input arguments had entities that did not belong to the same datacenter"

However, we've been doing this exact thing for some time using Virtual Center 2.5 and ESX 3.5 hosts using the VI Client. One data center (call it A) has our templates hosted on a SAN device. We've got a number of ESX 3.5 hosts in a separate data center (call it B). We routinely deploy from A to B using the VI Client. And it doesn't have any errors. It does have some warnings when a deployment is made concerning the networks may not be the same. We work around that by making sure that the networks under both data centers that have the same name are physically attached to the same network, so the warning can be safely ignored.

The problem occurred when we tried to automate this process using the PowerCLI (actually, the .NET interface). When we tried that for the first time, we encountered the "the input arguments had entities that did not belong to the same datacenter" error that everyone else sees. So, how does the VI Client do it? Both VI Client and the PowerCLI interface are using the same SDK at some level. Is there some extra command, some extra parameter that needs to be performed to get this to work?

Intermittent network connectivity to host & guests

gogram — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:04:36 GMT

Hello,
I have 2 ESXi4 servers running on IBM HS22 Blades.
They are currently connected to the networking backplane of the Blade chassis via a single NIC. (was 2 but testing the issue below)
When using the vSphere Client on both hosts, I get the following message appear when trying to look/modify/delete anything within the client:
"The request failed because the server "host1" closed the connection"

Also, when connecting to the guests (windows 2003) via RDP, I get connection resets every 15secs.

I am connecting to these hosts/guest through a firewall and have got logging enabled. The firewall logs are showing TCP resets while RDping to guests and using the vSphere client to perform tasks.

Version is ESXi4 171294. I have tried to perform patching of these servers but that's another issue!

Any suggestions please?

No network connection in clean install

roberbizimhatemo — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:24:58 GMT

Hi,

I installed ESX and configured the static ip address. I cannot ping
(default gateway and others) and the "host" command for domain-to-ip
resolution does also not work. When pinging IP's I get from the local
IP "Destination Host Unreachable".

I doublechecked the configuration and it looks good. I alse desactivated iptables to be sure, but no luck.

esxcfg-vswif -l gives:

vswif0 Service Console IPv4 10.0.0.45 255.255.255.0 10.0.0.255 true STATIC

In the VM's startconsole I get the following errors (in red):

0:00:00:02.203 cpu0:4096)PCI : 2060: failed for 000:28.0
0:00:00:02.203 cpu0:4096)PCI : 2060: failed for 000:28.2
0:00:00:02.203 cpu0:4096)PCI : 2060: failed for 000:28.3
0:00:00:02.203 cpu0:4096)PCI : 2060: failed for 000:28.4
0:00:00:02.203 cpu0:4096)PCI : 2060: failed for 000:28.5

ifconfig gives three elements: lo, vmnic (which has no ip, broadcast
and mask, status=UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST) en vswif0 (which has
the correct configuration,status=UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST).

vswifi has only TX packets, all the other properties of vswifi in lines beginning with RX and TX are set to 0.

I testen the system on Windows Xp and CentOS and they worked fine.

What can be the problem?

vconverter4 problem

FrantzCollini08 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:11:09 GMT

Hi,
i have the follow problem with a conversion of a windows 2003 phisycal server: i start the conversion and it was successfull but when i start the virtual server, it send me immediately an error "cannot read the disk. press CTRL+ALT+CANC".... i don't know what kind of problem generate this error...how can i do now?

Thanks in advance for the help!

HP ROK Windows Server 2008 TS-CAL

mjocham — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:18:24 GMT

Hi there,

we have a DL 380 G6 as the VMWare ESX4i Host and we installed a Windows Server 2008 R1 in Terminalserver-Mode. Can I use HP ROK TS-Cals for my users?

Thanks in advance

Can't ping VM, but Kernel on it's vSwitch

JoeAKim — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:05:46 GMT

Hi.

I'm experiencing some trouble:

I have a "HP DL380" with one NIC on board, and an extra NIC. Each having 2 ports. It's runnging ESXi 4.0 Installable.
When I create a new vSwitch, connecting to the 1st port (Mainboard), everything is fine.
When I create a second vSwitch, connected to either the 2nd (Mainboard) port, 3rd or 4th (extra-Card) port, and connect one of the VMs to it, the VM can't neither see the network, nor can it be pinged from outside.
Now, if I add a VMkernel to that vSwitch, the Kernel can be pinged without problems, but the VM is still isolated.

The on board card is a "NC373i Integrated Multifunctional Gigabit Server Adapter".
The extra card is a "NC380T PCI Express Dual Port Multiunctional Gigabit Server Adapter".
We have the same setup for some other customers, where everything works fine.

I'd really apreciate some help

Thanks a lot,
Joachim.

Cannot see Health Status in vSphere 4

amitdebnath — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:27:40 GMT

Hi,
I am using vSphere 4 as client and As host i'm using a ESX 4 server.
In configuration tab of Host Health Status is not showing in the Hardware section.
So I cannot see any health status information.

Is there any configuration that has to be enabled in vSphere or in host I have to install any addon?

Thanks and regards,
Amit

file level restore for linux systems for VMWare Data Recovery

seniornwb — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:03:10 GMT

Hi,

I was trying to dig up some information about the file level restore feature for VMware data recovery, specially for linux systems.

For example, is it limited to specific linux systems, specific linux filesystems being used within the guest.

For example, can it backup Novell NSS filesystems on linux.

I checked the documentation, but I can't seem to find any info in there about it.

Kind regards,

Hen

Design and best option advice please...

Vitaly91 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:44:46 GMT

Dear fellow virtual heads,

I am working on a project for a customer and have, as usual, several options to do some implementation tasks. What I am looking for is an opinion on the BEST and easiest way to do them. I hope you will share with me your thoughts and I am sure you will have some helpful advice.

General Info: it's a vSphere 4.0 implementation. Storage: Dell Equallogic iSCSI. Disks: 10K SATA (not sure on these though yet)

Currently customer has data stored locally on their physical servers. Some of them have HUGE amount of data (1TB plus). Some of them also run applications that have dependency on SQL servers that "support" them. So there is no single SQL cluster, but a bunch of smaller SQL boxes supporting their own application servers.

Questions:

1. What is the best way to P2V all these servers? What product to use considering the situation (VMware Converter vs Vizioncore vConverter)?

2. What is the best approach to moving data and presenting it back to the VMs? Should I P2V data disks along with the server and have them as VMDKs or should I move data to LUNs and present them back to VMs as RDM?

3. Should I try to utilize PVSCSI?

Any other thoughts on this project?

I thank you all for your help in advance and look forward to your advice!

esxi shutdown script for ups monitoring

helux — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:32:54 GMT

hello,

i just installed a new vmware esxi 4 server with the free standalone server license.
i have an apc ups and i need to buy a smart slot ethernet card to be able to monitor ups status in an vm.
after searching around i found out that the ghettoShutDown.pl script does not work because of the restrictions of perl in the free licensed version.

but we are able to enable ssh. it is unsupported but not illegal. i rather have a legal esxi version with no support on it than a supported illegal version.
after looking around in the forums i found out that the available scripts were not that good.

so i made my own....

save it on a vmfs volume. create ssh password less login and let apc daemon on a linux virtual machine fire up this script.

what is basically does: get list of all vm's on machine.
loop through that list to shutdown all vm's. loop will be run at least 1 time. it waits a specified interval to check if all machines are down. of not... power it down the hard way....

have fun using it.....

System Down- Panics After ESXi Hypervisor to pink screen

EvvRay — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 05:22:13 GMT

Hi All,

I am in a bad spot! I have a DL385 G1 with 4 GB ram and a raid 5 array running ESXi 4. I am running a production SBS 2008 server on it. I have been using it for about a month and the backup drive has not arrived yet so I have no backup. That is problem 1.

Here is what I wanted to accomplish, change the management network from 192.168.0.xx to 172.12.21.xx (I changed the rest of the network weeks ago) and replace the existing 4 GB of ram with 16GB of used ram.

Heres what led up to the problem:

1. Shutdown Guest VM's
2. Logged in with Vsphere client and changed the management network to the new ip. Immediately lost connection, connected on new IP and all is well.
3. The system has two integrated nics. One was running the VM network as well as the management network. The other was idle. They both connect to a simple switch. I believe I set them to bridge/failover, at which point they both showed as online. (This might be the issue)
4. Shutdown the system and let it self power off.
5. Removed the 4 sticks, and installed 8 sticks of the correct ecc ram.
6. Booted up and the system detects all 16 GB correctly in the bios.
7. Booted ultimate boot cd and ran memtest for 3 hours. It showed no errors yet and since I need the system, I told it to exit. The screen went black and the system wouldn’t respond to any keys. Forced power off wait 10 secs, turn back on.
8. System shows the loading esxi hypervisor screen then the screen goes pink and says there has been a panic. I don’t have the exact error but it mentioned connecting over serial, then a message, then connect over serial again, then some more text.
9. I unplugged both ethernet cords from the nics and tried to boot same error.
10. I removed all of the ram and went back to the original sticks, same error.
11. I booted from an Acronis trueimage disc and started a backup to an external USB drive of everything. It’s about a 568GB datastore, last I checked it said 13 days, and then awhile later, 7 days, so hopefully it will be done soon, but I don’t want to cancel it until I have those datastores backed up. That is why I can’t write the exact error down.

I am hoping it’s the network settings I changed making it panic, and not a same time hardware failure. What do you think?

Does esxi have a non destructive repair or setup?

If I get to the normal console screen, I know I could re-setup the management network or turn off the other card, but since it immediately panics that part doesn’t load yet. I do not have a serial cable, but if I must I might be able to get one from a friend. Please advise me what I might be able to do.

I am halfway temped to just re-load esxi after the backup completes, but I don’t know how I would get the vmdk files / vm files from that acronis file to the new system. I have done single file restores with acronis, on ntfs volumes, but I doubt it can look inside a vmware datastore.

Thanks in advance!

Possible to update ESXi via updates retrieved from a local server not via the Internet?

adminatater — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:08:08 GMT

Does anyone know if there is a way to get updates installed on a ESXi hypervisor via vSphere host update utility, when you have a network that can't access the Internet? The 'vSphere host update utilit' always checks the Internet first for the updates, is there anyway to have it always check a local directory? Oh yes, I'm using the latest version of the 'vSphere host update utility' that shipped with ESXi 4.0.

VM upgrade with Update Manager - how do you attach the Tools baseline

stanj — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:07:23 GMT

I am upgrading the Virtual Machines tools on one of our ESX Servers – ESX8.
There are several VMs (10-20). I tried to attach the default baseline provided with vSphere (VMware Tools Upgrade to Match) to the ESX Server and the VMware Tools Upgrade to Match baseline does not show up.

The vShpere upgrade video series #2 shows the user using a folder that he created in the Vm and Templates view with all of the Xp VMs in one folder.
He then attached the VMware Tools Upgrade to Match baseline and scans and remediates all of the Xps.

If I go to the Vm and Templates view and I see Discovered Vms folder, VMs, templates, etc.
But the VMs associated look to be in alphabetical order and not in an order that associates them with ESX8.
If I create a folder under the Discovered VMs folder and try to move VMs associated with ESX8 into the folder, it does not work.

I even tried to create a new baseline and tried to add VMware Tools Upgrade to Match, but still can not attach it to the host.

Is there way to get Update Manager to work at the host level with the host ESX8 so I can attach VMware Tools Upgrade to Match baseline to ESX8 and update the tools?

Otherwise, updating all of the VMs manually by attaching the baseline to each will take a very long time.

thanks

ISCSI problem between ESXi 4.0 and QNAP 809u ISCSI NAS.

TraversiRoberto — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:11:20 GMT

Hi all,

i'm experiencing a strange problem mapping different ISCSI targets from the same ESXi host.

I'm aware that QNAP ISCSI NAS is not officially supported but at the moment it is the cheapest around providing so much storage space (12TB in 2 rack unit).

I have two 809u ISCSI NAS, the first has ip 10.101.12.61, the second 10.101.12.62.
The ESXi server has IP 10.101.12.63.

When i connect via ISCSI only the 10.101.12.61 i can see correctly the 8 targets it shares, if i connect only th 10.101.12.62 i can see correclty the 8 targets it shares.

If i connect 10.101.12.61 first and after 10.101.12.62 the ESXi server sees only 8 targets (targets published by 10.101.12.61) and 16 paths (8 from 10.101.12.61 and 8 from 10.101.12.62).

I'm not able to understand if it could be a ESXi problem or a QNAP problem.

I've already contacted both vendors to ask for support but i wasn't able to find a solution for this problem.
Can anyone help? Tnx Roberto.

Thin provisioning prerequisites?

BorgSquirrel — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:50:53 GMT

All,

I have upgraded our vCenter server to version 4 but all the hosts are still running 3.5u3 but I noticed that I can now use thin provisioning from the GUI. I tried it on one of my "guinea pig guests"and it seems to work just fine.What I am wondering is if this is a supported combo, 3.5 hosts and 4.0 vCenter? I don't want to start using this on our production guests unless I know it is really ok to run it this way, not just that it apparently works

Any input appreciated, thanks!

How to trap IOs in VMKernel

vmkdev — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:07:06 GMT

Hi All,

I'm writing a vmk module for trapping IOs. I want to implement this functionality only in vmkernel module. I am completely new to ESX, Any directions/suggestions to achieve it will be a great help.

Basically I want to write a driver like a packet filter, which looks at the IO and does some sort of analysis.

Thanks in advance.

ravi

NetApp:SNAPDrive and SNAPManager for Exchange on an RDM

VMScot — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:33:40 GMT

I found an archived discussion that was about two years old, so I figured I resubmit this question. I want to use Netapp's SNAPDrive and SNAPManager for Exchange on a Physical RDM. All the documention points to using the iSCSI initiator from within the VM, but I've got iSCSI HBAs and therefore this isn't an option. Any suggestions?

Maps in vSphere 4 vCS

NHessonSD21 — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:44:18 GMT

Hello all,

Is this a bug or by design? I can't believe it's by design, doesn't make any sense. From Home, I click Maps under Management. If I check only VM to Network or Host to VM under Map Relationships: and then check a node higher then the cluster (meaning checking Data Center or above that). The maps will not be drawn out. All objects are there. But none of the lines are drawn out.

This has to be wrong? If I Check the cluster, host, or vm first the make my way of the hierarchy. The lines then become drawn.

Please let me know if this is normal. And again if so, why? Well never mind the why? Hopefully I'm the only one with this issue. Since it shouldn't work this way.

Thanks for your time and help,

Nick

PS, the image is what I see, when I do the steps above.

Applying service to ESXi 4

bishopit — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:11:42 GMT

I have installed ESXi 4 on a server (very simple). To apply the maintenance it appears you have to use the remote CLI
I have installed the appliance and brought up the virtual machine.
What I can't seem to do is find a way to get access to the patch files. I have tried a CD and an ISO image in the datastore.
The virtual machine will not mount the ISO image or the real CDROM. Gives a message that it is not a valid block device.

Can you apply the patches to ESXi 4 or am I just wasting my time. If so is there a document that details applying patches
in this environment?

I am trying to evaluate the usefullness of ESX in our environment but am nervous about putting a machine in production that
I can't apply updates to.

restoring an vm to a different host

CMCC — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:35:55 GMT

I'm having this error when I try to restore a VM

~~2009-11-12 16:19:36.075 'App' 3076449088 info~~ Current working directory: /
/usr/sbin/vcbRestore: line 1: 6315 Aborted LD_LIBRARY_PATH=:/usr/lib/vmware/hostd VCB_PASSWORD="$PASSWORD" /usr/lib/vmware/vcb/vcbRestore -h "$VCHOST" -u "$USERNAME" -s "$legacy_dir" --

Please help me! I don't know what else to try.

Thanks

Any way to get an alert when NIC drops to 100MB or disk latency goes above a certain level in vSphere?

badger77 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:00:20 GMT

Hello,

We have 3 NICs connecting to our iSCSI storage, and every so often one of the NICs drops from 1000MB to 100MB, which causes response problems (as you would expect).

I am going to raise a support call with our vendor, although I strongly suspect the Broadcom cards, but in the meantime can anyone think of a way I can actually get an alert when this speed drops in vSphere (or a clever Linuxy way, although I am not an expert) ? As far as I can see it's not actually logged in vSphere.

Disk latency also goes high when connection speed drops, but there does not seem to be an alert for this either.

cheers,

Craig.

Official support of vSphere client under Windows 7 - when?

Primetime_de — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:52:37 GMT

Hi,

at first - I know the workaround.

A costumer asks when there will be official support of Windows 7 for the vSphere client.

Will it comes with the 4.0.1 release which is - as far as I know - planned for Novermber/December?

Best regards

Christian

VM disconnect from DVS

Bisti — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:37:56 GMT

I am encountering weird (for me atleast) issue - During VCB backup (fullvm, quiesced) of SQL server serving vCenter database (placed on separate vm than vCenter) the SQL vm stops responding and hang resulting in vCenter service stop and that is ok, but when all that happens the SQL vm vnic gets disconnected from dvs (distributed virtual switch) and as vCenter service is down I am unable to recconect that machine back to dvs. The vnic have "connect on startup" option enabled but reboots does not help. What makes thigs more messed up is that this issue affects some vms (getting disconnected after reboot when vcenter is down) and some not.

So if I get this right - if vCenter goes down than all vms will get disconnected after they reboot (On DVS)? If so than putting vcenter and sql on separate vms makes no sense in HA and DVS enviroment.

RAMDIS: ran out of compressed data

HT007 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:19:42 GMT

Hi,

I have following setup two Dell R710 servers with mirrored drives each 146GB. Both servers connected to Dell MD3000. Two ESX 4 Essential Plus boxes are connected through SAS cables to storgage. It was happy working for a couple of weeks until we restarted both ESX boxes. We restarted first one, it did came up fine and then second did not came up.

Gives error on boot:

RAMDISK: ran out of compressed data
invalid compressed format (err=1)

Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0)

Keyboard is not responding, I will probably reinstall that box, but this can happen again or another box ?Funny games with new ESXes.

Partitions sizes as follow on both esx hosts:

/ – 5120MB
Swap – 1600MB
/var – 4096MB
/home – 2048MB
/opt – 2048MB
/tmp – 2048MB

Please advise what to do?

Thanks.

MD1000

shaunroe — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:15:16 GMT

Issue with Dell MD1000 using ESXi 4.

Setup:

Dell Perc 5/e
MD1000
ESXi 4 installed on embedded memory card.

I have added the storage using the wizard with now issue. I then copied some ISO images and a templete to the storage. After that I deployed a new VM from the templete, still no issue.

The day after I went back in and could not get on to the cosole of the VM, it had a error reading the configuration file, so I went to browse the datastore and could not see anything on there, everything was gone.

I done a refresh on the storage and it now cannot see the the datastore. If I add storage again, I can see the lun but I get the error below.

"Error during the configuration of the host: Failed to get disk partition information"

If I delete the the disk from through the perc bios tools and re create it I can then add it back to the esx server. It then works for a couple days and fails again.

How to use VM Host profile in ESXi 4 before and after ESXi reinstall on USB ?

AlbertWT — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:11:56 GMT

Hi All,

Since I'm preparing myself to reformat my ESXi due to the LUN reconfiguration, I'd like know how to use VM host profile so that i don't need to reconfigure all of the vSwitches and iSCSI settings.

I've created a host profile for my current ESXi host when I right click the hostname, then the problem is I don't know where that configuration file is saved ?

and also I tried to right click on the new host that I've just reinstall, but then I could not see where should I load the configuration from ?

Kind Regards,
AWT

Script Backup for ESX4 (SAN)

Backdoor32 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:00:54 GMT

hi,

It's the firt time i post, so i hope that i did it rigth...

I tried to backup my VM to a SAN via Samba. I can copy my VM to the SAN but i'm not able to Restore it. Could someone help me?

to do it:

mount the disk --> mount //$ESX_bck/share $ESX_backupdir -o username=test,password=test 1>/var/log/vegas.log
copy the VM --> /usr/sbin/vcbMounter -h $ESX_host -u $ESX_user -p $ESX_pass -a name:$ESX_VMS -r $ESX_backupdir/$ESX_VMS -t fullvm -m cos -M 1 -L 6 >/var/log/ESX_VMS.log 2>/dev/null

what i obtain on my SAN:

directory wiki01_original

unmount.dat\	74.00	Wed Jan 7 02:13:21 2009
cifs7ef1\	4.61 GB	Wed Jan 7 02:28:31 2009

How i tried to restore it

Mount the SAN --> mount //$ESX_bck/share $ESX_backupdir -o username=****,password=*****
Restore the VM --> vcbRestore -t cifs -h $ESX_host -u $ESX_user -p $ESX_pass -s $ESX_backupdir -fullvm -a name:wiki01_original -b prompt

I get this error message

Directory /backup/tmp/wiki01_original does not seem to contain a virtual machine backup
ls /backup/tmp/wiki01_original
- cifs7ef1
- unmount.dat

What's wrong? vcbMounter make a cifs file, is it rigth?

thanks

Update Manager Remediate

jaydee01 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:59:13 GMT

Hi All

Hope someone can help, After patching a server with update manager - the patch install ran succesfuly but the "Remediate Entity" has stuck at 57%.
The task has stayed at this for the past 2 days?

Any recommendations would be appreciated

Thanks

Jonathan

About the compatibility of lsi 2008 sas RAID card

dragooner — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:20:03 GMT

Hello,you guys.

AMM.I have a blade server which Supermicro called it SBI-7126T-S6.Of cause you can find it as flowing link：

http://www.supermicro.com/servers/blade/module/SBI-7126T-S6.cfm

From the Server hardware configuration can be see，the RAID card will be a point may cause problems.

The holy question is that I want to know,whether the vSphere4 or what we called ESX4 can be installed on this server？

Is there any guys had used this server to install the vSphere4？The server SBI-7126T-S6 must be have all ready yet OEM for some products.

My VM vsphere client suddenly say that my hosts are disconnected!

hirschi — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:11:06 GMT

I have done nothing, but suddenly the first said disconnected and then the others follow! - ESX 4

ESXi on a simple Workstation

reinhardmayr — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:08:46 GMT

Hy everbody!

i have a very funny problem with my esxi 4 installation.
I tested the esxi on a simple workstation with a gigabyte board, 4gb memory, a amd quadcore cpu, 2 e1000 nic´s.
Very fine the installation make no problem and the server runs up.

I think oay install the vsphere client und configure the server with a managemant ip.
so on i have the problem, i can not connect to the esxi with the client or the inet explorer but the ping response great. ??

Can i solve this Problem ?

Have any one a idea ?

Thanks a lot !

cya Reinhard

guided consolidation does not collect system information

NHessonSD21 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:34:26 GMT

I have vCenter 4 installed with 2 esx 4 hosts, all in one VLAN. Then I have a system (Win2k3, Static IP, Browser Service Started, but in workgroup) I want to use as my Guided Consolidation Box (GCB from now on). So I installed vSphere VIC, guided consolidation, and Converter. All installations went fine, and all services are started on the GCB.

I have GCB and the physical hosts, I want to ran guided consolidation on, in the same Vlan, same workgroup (WORKGROUP of course), and can see all systems using "Net View /domain:workgroup" from the GCB, and Hosts. The hosts and GCB all have the same administrative user account and password. The GC services are using this account. All OS firewalls are disabled.

Here is the problem, once I add a system for analysis, (via IP, FQDN, or netbios name) the Status just stays at "Collecting System Information" Confidence "low", and does nothing. Just sits there forever, and anything happens? Nothing is seen from the Tasks tab as well. Am I doing anything wrong? Is there a Run analysis button I am missing? Is it suppose to work right after I add the system?

I have try restarting everything. I also captured network traffic to see what happens after I add a host for analysis, and see nothing happen. Like it does not ever connect.

Also, how long should this take?

Please help, thanks for your time and help,

Nick