So, to summarize should we get the kernel updated to 2.6.9-42.0.8 AND apply the vmware patch via http://kb.vmware.com/vmtnkb/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=51306&sliceId=SAL_Public
OR do we just apply the kernel patch and we should be good to go since the problem really was in rhel4?

I was set on just going to the latest kernel, but then "Ops Admin" replied 2 posts before this one and said that he was on the latest kernel and still had problems..

Hi,

I am having problem on RHEL4U3, RHEL3U8 and SUSE9 SP3 VMs. This is a NAS / SAN system and I am running Connectathon test which is an NFS test for NAS side testing. When running the special test using NFS version 3 , using UDP protocol, it gets stuck at a point where it says "write/read 30 MB file". On RHEL3U8 and SUSE9 SP3, it gets stuck for 5-7 min, then continues fine. On RHEL4U3, it gets stuck forever.

Is my problem and the problem you discussed can be related? Plesae let me know.

update 5 is out now, anyone know if this solves the issue?

I would be interested in knowing if the RHEL4 U5 kernel has the fix too.

I also have the issue showing up on 2 of my RHEL5 systems. So we are all in the same boat...

I am so glad I found this thread! We've had this problem with SLES 10 VMs using the LSI Logic adapter on 3.0.0 (we'll be uprading to 3.0.1 soon). After researching this issue from the Linux kernel side, I found that the mptbase LSI Logic SCSI driver code in the 2.6.x kernel is buggy on its own, unrelated to VMware.

http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/10/11/224

I have 2 SLES 10 and 1 SLES 9 VMs all on 2.6.x kernels. The two SLES 10s were built with the LSI Logic adapter and driver and the SLES 9 VM was built with the Buslogic adapter. Both of the SLES 10 VMs experience the massive scsi errors and the read only remounts. The SLES 9 VM using Buslogic goes not.

I'm going to convert to Buslogic on the SLES 10 VMs and see if that helps. I think I saw a procedure for this documented in this thread. If not I'll figure it out, implement it, and I'll post back with results.

Oh, btw, we're all FC SAN at my shop. IBM and Nexsan arrays, Qlogic switches. No multipathing. We have a mix of VMFS volumes with multiple VMs stored on each VMFS. We map RDMs to individual VMs that need lots of storage. As a general rule, for any VM that will need over 10GB (i.e. database server), we create a 10GB virtual disk on a shared VMFS volume and install the base OS on it. We then map an RDM to it, format it with Reiser3, and mount it into the filesystem.

I do see some SCSI errors in our W2K3 VM event logs but we're not having huge issues as a result of them, not like with these Linux VMs. However, if the Buslogic adapter/driver works better in Windows, I'll look into swapping those over as well.