>That's happened to me before as well. If I know I am going to type a long post I write it in a document then copy and paste.<
And I knew how awful it is, and I often do that too. However, I'm so used to working on all the other forums, which use the defacto standard vBulletin, that I forgot to this time. I'm not going to spemd the time orgainizing it like I did the first time, but this is the gist of it.
1. Two nights ago, the DC ws supposed to replace the processor. I set the alarm, waited, and they dropped the ball. This time I set the alarm 1/2 hour inside of the maintenance window. When that time came, I saw they hadn't updated it so I append to the ticket. No answer. I made up a new ticket to point to the original ticket. It took another hour to find the guy with the ticket, and now we were outside of the maintenance window by over an hour. The tech told me he was outside of the window unless I wanted it down now. I sent another ticket back to do it now. I watched and watched and now didn't happen. 22 milnutes after “now”, I appended the ticket to scratch it since traffic was picking up. Then the server went down. He had the processor in and the server up within 10 minutes after that, and everything was working really well.
2. Over the next hour and half I was very pleased with the performance of the new 6 core processor. I was comparing graphs before an after. I had just relaxed, and I got a text on my phone. It was Zabbix telling me the site was down. I thought, how can that be with loads of .65. I went to the site, but no site. Then I tried to connect via the CP. No luck. Then I went the the VM Client. The load was almost nothing. Then I checked out the other two VMs. They seemed fine, but not the critical VM.
3. I decided, it worked well for the past hour and a half. I wonder what the deal is. I had set a snapshot from before the upgrade, so I decided to go back to that. Bad move. I got a message about how it couldn’t do that because of the new CPU. I no longer have the exact error message since it is now lost due to this forum. Well, I might as well just delete it then. That worked, but something must have happened when I told it to go to the snapshot I did because now it won’t start and had a red exclamation point next to it. I tried a few suggestions here on the thread and got it to boot, it needed a bunch of fsck, and basically ended up being damaged to where nobody would trust it. So I spent another 56 minutes bringing it back from the backup server. It booted up fine then, but simply didn’t work.
4. Next I typed up a support ticket explaining all this. They said they would escalate the ticket. Within a few minutes, I saw a ticket confirmation come in with a different ticket number on it. I figured they had started a new one, and was going to ignore it, but for some reason I looked at it. It had nothing to do with my ticket, but explained about some “Short Notice” maintenance they had to do. Then a couple pieces snapped together in my mind that the other two VMs that were fine, I checked over the VPN. I updated my other ticket and told them to hold off yanking the new processor until they get their network straightened out, and give them some IP addresses of VMs to ping.
5. I launched the VCL and went to the console on the Windows machine, and logged in. I tried to ping common servers on the internet and could not. I pinged the other VMs. I SSHed into them. Then I launched a browser, and while I could not go to the internet, I could open the control panel on the critical machine over the VPN. All of the processors were running fine.
6. While going through all this checking, I got another text message telling me they were back on line. Shortly thereafter I received an e-mail that said they can ping the VMs that I gave them.
Thus, I was victim of an unusual series of events that cost me a day, untold damage to a site that normally receives 6.5 million unique visitors a month, and stress that took about a year off my life. It also makes this thread meaningless, and should be deleted because it implicates neither VMware nor hardware that works with it. About the only lesson I can think of that can be learned is you can hurt yourself by trying to go back to a previous snapshot of your processor changed. This processor was the same family and speed with two cores added.
I thank everyone's helpful suggestions.
