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s00pcan
Contributor
Contributor

Several issues with ESXi - server took too long to respond, VMs becoming inaccessible

This is the firs time I've tried ESXi and I'm still playing around with it learning how to use it. So far, I haven't been able to use it very reliably. I installed it then installed a vm with Ubuntu and a vm with Windows Server 2008. Eventually it started giving me an error "server took too long to respond" when trying to log into vsphere. The built-in webserver on the host didn't work either while that was happening. I reset the settings on the host machine and lost my vms and datastore. Trying to re-add it didn't work, it would just hang at the third screen on the add storage wizard (saying loading without ever doing anything). I had to reinstall ESXi and both vms to get back to where I was. I then installed some programs on linux to test them out. At the end of the day (to test it) I powered off the machine while it was in the middle of being used using the power button. Now I come back and turn it on and both vms are inaccessible (that's only when it doesn't give me the server took too long to respond error) and I can't add a datastore (which should already be there). Is this program really that unreliable? What am I missing here? I can't imagine actually using it in production if it's going to have my vms disappear and not respond like this.

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Scissor
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

First I want to confirm that you aren't seriously overallocating resources to your Guests and overwhelming your Host. Start with 1 vCPU and a small amount of RAM for each Guest.

If the above isn't the problem, then it sounds like a hardware issue on your Host. Perhaps disk or array controller problems?

You could log into the console and look at the /var/log/messages file to see if there are any errors logged. (Instructions for accessing the console are here: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003677 )

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s00pcan
Contributor
Contributor

I don't know if the vms are using too much of the available resources. I get an unhandled exception in vsphere trying to view the resource allocation tab of the inaccessible guests, and I can't change their settings right now anyway. Also, it has an event that says "Configuration file cannot be found", I'm doing a config reset now. I believe I had 2GB of ram allocated to each guest (4GB total on this machine) so that was probably too much. I don't know what the cpu settings were, but it's a core 2 duo machine. I'll try logging into the console now.

Edit: Ok, I have the message log up. I don't see anything from yesterday, which is odd. I don't really know what to look for on here.

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