Hi,
I'm fairly new to ESXi, and am having a problem with a Dell Poweredge 1800 server.
I have 2 Windows XP machines running with their virtual hard drives under 10gb, these run fine. I have attempted to build a 2003 Server with a larger 30gb drive numerous times now, but after I build a machine with a virtual drive of over around 20gb the machine will crash on boot, and also take the datastore with it!
The only way the bring things back is a hard reset of the server. This brings back the datastore and the smaller XP machines work, but a boot of the larger server machine does the same thing and crashes the datastore. When I first built the the 2003 server it was only using 8gb with thin provisioning and worked fine. I consolidated some snapshots for backup purposes and this created the full size VMDK file of around 50gb (the full provisioned amount), and this server also started to have the problem, so I'm quite sure it's a VMDK file size issue although I've no idea why...
Yesterday I completely rebuilt the ESXi host, with new RAID mirrors and updated the firmware on the hard drive controller in the Dell. Built a new server with a 20gb virtual drive and got exactly the same thing. Although an XP machine with an 8.5gb drive that I had backed up from the previous build restored and worked absolutely fine!
I'm at my wits end now, and my client isn't too happy either, it looks like I'm going to have to dump ESXi and build the Dell into a 2003 server. Thought I'd see if anyone has had a similar problem as I would much prefer to continue with ESXi.
Many thanks in advance for any help,
Bill Hurst
