RHEL 5.1 Beta on ESX

[AndyMcM]

Hi There

Has anyone tried installing the new RHEL 5.1 Beta on ESX?

Seem to be having problems with it, When I boot from the ISO it does not recognise the disk, have use both LSI & BusLogic SCSI adaptor but no avail.

Very bizzare as RHEL 5 runs no probs and have that working fine.

Can anyone help?

A.

[AaronBlack]

did you ever get an answer on this? I've got a customer with the same issue

[AndyMcM]

Hey there, not got anywhere with this one afraid. Was tempted to raise an issue with VMware about it and see how that goes, but doupt that they will support it since its Beta.

A.

[deploylinux]

not just cd, we just did an upgrade to the 5.1 beta kernel on an existing vm and it crashes complaining about not being able to find rootfs.

stay away from kernel 2.6.18-36 apparently.

[jadamt]

Anyone had more luck with this now that 5.1 is GA and ESX 3.0.2 officially supports it? How's 5.1 GA on ESX 3.5?

[clerum]

I'm running ESX 3.5 with CENTOS 5.1 /w 2.6.18-53.1.14.el5 x64 on 8 guests. No problems at all.

[deploylinux]

Update on rhel 5.1 and 5.2 beta under esx 3.5:

- Newest redhat 5.x kernels do appear to boot correctly, and even run production vm's fine. You just have to test all kernel updates on a dev vm before deploying them to production sites.

- There are some issues with ntp synchronization that get much,much worse with 5.1 and which seem to go out of control on smp vm's. We reverted all 4-way vm's to 8.1.15 kernels for time being, otherwise they just wont sync and you will notice time shifting horribly even on a per second basis.

- Our standard production deployments have "notsc iommu=soft" as grub boot time parameters.

-I haven't done any testing on 5.1/5.2 boot iso's, we just upgrade our development vm's which were already installed with 5.0

[jadamt]

Have you tried out the the new kernel parameter in 5.1, divider=10 to reduce the time mesurement from 1000 Hz to 100Hz? Not 100% sure of the effect of clock drift but it does reduce CPU contention. Do you guys use VMware tools timesync and disable ntpd?

[clerum]

I'm using the VMware Tools to sync time, but I wasn't clear if the divider=10 was supported on the x64 kernel. Can anyone confirm this?

On another subject is anyone using a tickless kernel in production? I'm guessing we won't see it in RHEL/CENTOS until 6.0 but ubuntu is already there right?

[CMCC]

Look at this

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=100210...

and tell me if this results

[CMCC]

This is for esx 3.0.1, but there is the similar patch for 3.0.2, just look for it if this could help you