Memory Dumps without SnapShot

[davercyclone]

My Exchange Server is having random lockups. Microsoft have told me they need a Memory Dump from a Snap Shot. Unfortunatley the way our Datastore is configured and the size of the Disks (1MB BlockSize) means Snap Shots fail as mentioned here: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=100292....

We have no other Datastores that I can move the working directory to...is there any other way of getting a Memory Dump from an unresponsive Windows VM upon a crash?

Thanks in advance.

[weinstein5]

Are you sure Microsoft Tech Suppport is asking for the virtual machine memory snapshot taken by VMware or a memory dump from the windows os?

[davercyclone]

A memory dump using vmss2core.exe.

[eeg3]

Just a theoretical idea, but assuming you have other servers with free space, you could try setting up NFS on them and then creating an NFS datastore to output to.

[chriswahl]

If you can present other storage to move the VMs off the datastore (storage vMotion or cold migration), you can then destroy the 1MB block datastore and re-create it with an 8MB block size.

[davercyclone]

I might have to try the NFS idea...vMotion to another DS is not an option.