Concerns with vmotion problems on ESX 4.1

[EdZ]

I've been seeing a significant impact on ESX 4.1 VM's being affected by the vmotion issues mentioned in this article

Resuming or performing a vMotion of a 64-bit virtual machine results in application instability and/or poor performance

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=102844...

It is causing IIS to crash and requires a reboot to recover from it, and it is also causing SQL to crash, also requring a reboot to recover. This seems like a pretty significant issue - I've searched the discussions and couldn't find anything on it yet. Are other people concerned about this or experiencing impact?

Thanks,

Ed Z

[OndrejHolas]

We have also experienced exactly the same application errors (especially when using System.Xml.XslCompiledTransform - very heap-intensive), but on ESX 4.0 update 2, when the app was 32-bit running in 64-bit guest (both W2K3 x64 and W2K8R2 were affected). After moving the guest to AMD-V+RVI capable host (also ESX4 U2) and checked that "virtual exec" is "hardware", the errors disappeared.

We are able to reliably reproduce this with loading large XSLT template into System.Xml.XslCompiledTransform object in some reasonable amount of threads (actually 10) simultaneously.

OH

[Cyberfed27]

I'm running quite a few virtual machines in x64 2008 and 2008R2. SQL IIS and Oracle.

No issues here when using vMotion. I'm running ESX 4.1

[EdZ]

Thanks for the feedback. Cyberfed27, I wonder if the CPU's you are running are newer and not affected by the issue. From what I gathered from the article AMD Opteron Gen 3 processors (see ) would not be affected by this issue nor would Intel CPU's. I would be most interested to find out if that is the case.

Thanks,

Ed