VM unresponive during part of the clone process

[tijz]

Hi All,

Not entirely sure where to post this, so if it's in the wrong community, please forgive me.

The problem:

Last week I made a clone of a VM during production hours. After the copy operation (@ about 85% or so) the source VM became unresponsive for about 10 minutes (!!). The OS of the VM is Windows 2003 with Lotus Domino. All users lost access to their mailboxes. Pings to the server timed out. In the vSphere Client I was not able to connect to the console.

After about 10 minutes the progress bar of the clone operation switched to 100% and everything was fine again.

The setup:

We have a small cluster of two ESX 4.0 hosts (HP DL380G6) connected to an HP MSA2000 using iSCSI.

The clone I made was to the same storage.

The Question:

I made a lot of clones on lots of different setups and never experienced anything like this. But could I have expected this, should I not make clones of production servers during office hours?

What could be an explanation for this occurence?

[idle-jam]

I have lotus domino and we occasionally clone without any problem. btw have you clone before or this is the first time? are you able to see any windows event logs or vcenter/host logs to show us more info?

iDLE-jAM | VCP 2, VCP 3 & VCP 4

If you found this or any other answer useful please consider the use of the Helpful or correct buttons to award points.

[tijz]

Thanks for your answer.

I went through windows application and system logs on the vCenter server and the Domino virtual server, but there are no errors or warning around the time of the hang or at all actually.

In the task log of the vCenter itself I found the following warning around the time I started the clone operation:

"Migration of %hostname% to 192.168.x.x and

resource pool Resources: Copying this virtual

machine will cause loss of snapshots at the

destination."

Could this be a problem? There is/was one running snapshot on the original server.

[idle-jam]

Probably it could be due to that they are commit the snapshots and if it's very big it cause the virtual machine to be unresponsive. Can you try without the snapshot on? and also how big is the snapshot?

iDLE-jAM | VCP 2, VCP 3 & VCP 4

If you found this or any other answer useful please consider the use of the Helpful or correct buttons to award points.

[tijz]

Yeah propably.

No time (and storage) to do another clone. I awarded you the helpfull answer points as it's pointed me to the logs and I found the snapshot warning.

Can not be sure this was the cause however.