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flyingscubakev
Contributor
Contributor

Network timeout in 2003std x64 host on esxi4.1

Hi All,

Looked at a bunch of threads and I'm not sure which is really applicable to my problem. I am running esxi 4.1 on a Dell PowereEdge R610 with 24Gb of memory, 4x600Gb drives in RAID 10. I have the 4 on-borad NICS configured in 2 lans (different subnets). I have one host that is running Linux and communicates over the "dmz" lan- this machine was just a test machine and everything seemed fine. I just converted a Server 2003 STD x64 to a VM (P2V) and it is communicating over the other LAN (this is also my management lan). The host seems to be running OK, but since this is our "File Server" I tried copying files back and forth to test. Grabbing a file from the server to my local machine seems fast, copying a 3Mb file says that it will take over 6 minutes and then times out. I tried copying the same file to my Linux machine and it took a couple seconds. The driver in the MS OS is set to the Intel Pro/1000 MT card.

So, should I change the driver in the MS OS to the vmxnet3 card? If so, how do I go about doing that? (Doing a device scan doesn't show any other card except for the Intel).

I want to conver a Physical SUSE server (running mail) to this Esxi 4.1 server, do I need to use a specific driver for that machine as well? (I tried this P2V once and it seemed like there were timeout issues and shut it down and went back to the physical machine)

I know 2 different issues but I think it is the same type of problem -- the network card.

Thanks

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golddiggie
Champion
Champion

After the P2V did you remove all ghost hardware from the Windows server?

VMware VCP4

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flyingscubakev
Contributor
Contributor

In the OS, I set DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1, opened the management console. showed hidden and removed all "grayed" items. (pretty sure I got all of them) Unless there was something else I was supposed to do?

I just copied a 23MB file from my laptop to the file share on that host - it took over 8 minutes. Then I copied another 23MB file from the host down to my laptop and it took just a couple seconds.

Kev

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flyingscubakev
Contributor
Contributor

another update in case anyone is looking in! Users that are accessing a SQL DB on this server (MS 2003) and any of the quickbooks company files that are stored on this server are getting bumped. or timeout/database errors. On a few occasions the servers main console displayed "Delayed Write Failed .....".

Is this looking like a network driver issue?

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jpdicicco
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

"Delayed write failed" is storage-related. Did you ever have another datastore on this host that you removed, or you "lost" and rebuilt?



Happy virtualizing!

JP

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Happy virtualizing! JP Please consider awarding points to helpful or correct replies.
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flyingscubakev
Contributor
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When I first built this server it had the default block size which wouldn't allow my conversion of a P2V machine because of it's 300GB drive. So according to the VM docs I removed the datastore and recreated it with the larger block size and then was able to complete my P2V conversion. I don't think that is related because the Linux VM works fast.

Plus, I just downed and removed the Intel LAN card from the VM config and added in the vmxnet3 adapter, rebooted and cleaned up the ghost device assigned the proper IP address to the vmxnet3 driver and rebooted

That 23GB file that took 10 minutes this morning is now taking seconds, like it used to when this was a physical machine.

So it looks like the LAN card did matter this time!

Kev

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