Fault Tolerance - secondary VM consumes large amount of memory?

[jameran]

Hi,

I'm experiencing a Fault Tolerance problem with a pair of new servers using X5570 processors. The two ESX hosts are 4.0, updated with VUM as of October 11th (today). Whenever I create an FT enabled guest, the secondary guest experiences very high RAM utilization.

As shown on the attached screenshot, the secondary guest shows 88+ % memory utilization, even when the primary VM shows only 27% memory utilization.

On the forums, I've only found one other instance of this error, but no solution or explanation yet. Has anyone determined the cause or fix to this? I'd appreciate your feedback.

Thanks!

[java_cat33]

Have you confirmed the following patch has been applied to the ESX host? (I realise you've done recent updates)

[jameran]

Hi - thanks for your reply. Yes, I can confirm that both 1014019 and 1014026 have been applied to both hosts.

[jameran]

The plot thickens... I've noticed that this problem is NOT present with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 virtual machines. So far, this issue only happens when the FT protected guest is Windows Server 2003.

[DwightT]

I'm seeing the same thing.

ESXi 4 fully patched... Makes me grumpy...

[Alex_Garthwaite]

Looking at the image, it looks like both cpu and memory utilization are much higher on the secondary than on the primary. Is that always the case? Does this only happen with the secondary VM regardless of where the primary and secondary are run?

One thing that would help would be if you could run 'vm-support' on both the primary and secondary platforms when this happens. In fact, if you could do this two or three times with each pair of runs separated by five minutes and upload these logs, we may be able to figure out why the difference is happening.