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fstephane1
Contributor
Contributor

VMware ESXi 6.7 | Ubuntu 18.04 32-bit | Web Server Application becomes Unresponsive

My company distributes a local web server that runs on an Ubuntu 18.04 32-bit VM.

One client has this running on VMware ESXi 6.7 and our software goes down periodically (every couple of weeks - hard to tell because it's not used every day).

We have many instances installed on VMware and none of them have this issue.

The VM is still running and shows this output:

First Instance

First_Fail.png

Second Instance

Second_Fail.png

The Client's IT has been able to resolve this by just restarting the VM. But that's not a long-term solution

I don't have direct access to the VM so I can't tinker with it anytime, but I can set up a session with their IT to dig into this.

However I'm not very experienced with Ubuntu or VMware so I'm having trouble making sense of this output or determining whether it's indicative of our main issue.

If anyone could help me shed some light on this or guide my troubleshooting I would be very grateful!

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scott28tt
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

I believe that vmw_balloon is the memory reclamation balloon driver installed as part of VMware Tools - they can be removed and reinstalled.

Are the hosts under memory contention?

If so, a short-term option would be to reserve all the memory for the VM as that should stop the driver being triggered.


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Lalegre
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Hey fstephane1​,

First of all, if you check in the VMware Compatibility Matrix you will see that Ubuntu 18.04 32-bit is not there as it is not supported and if this is a production instance you should migrate to 64 bit or to any distribution which is supported in 32-bit.

However in the meanwhile try to check that you are using VMXNET3 as the vNIC type and your Open VMTools are up to date which are the recommended ones for almost all the Linux distributions. Also I saw a post resolved a long time ago and they resolved it by upgrading the Kernel version:Kernel tracebacks after vSphere upgrade to 6.0 . Of course is a different Kernel version but maybe is the same issue.

However, remember, the Guest OS is not supported so it should not be used in production.

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