Virtual Machine Crash

[dezaxatul]

Hello,

I have an issue with ESXI 5.0 installed on a E3-1245v2 with 32GB RAM

I'm running 6-7 Win2008R2 VMs with 2x vCPU and 3GB RAM each.

I've overcommitted CPU a little bit, but all RAM is locked. I've also set a minimum of 800MHz for each VM.

The problem is, ALL VMs crash (BSOD) at random time intervals (usually once or twice per day).

Could it be due to overcommitment of CPU?

Is it possible, if all VMs request full power at the same time, to make one of the VMs crash?

Or is this more likely an OS issue?

I have no clue where to start troubleshooting this issue.

Could someone please help me?

Thanks

[Anjani_Kumar]

yes, its possible that if some of the vms request for 100%cpu and in the case they didnt get it they can crash too.

Windows 2008R2 never comes with rendom bsod untill something really wrong.

you can test them by running half of your vms and check if they are still comes with blue screen. if yes, than you can start investigating the OS side. If No, Than you must power them up .

Hope it will works.

[ashleymilne]

Can you tell us something about the hardware of the server, is it  name brand or white box? How long has it been running for? If you remove the 800MHz limit does that stabilize things?

[smithar]

Is there any other VM with a different OS running on the server? Could you please let me know the processor type and the CPU cores for this server?

[dezaxatul]

Thank you for your answers!

I will remove the CPU reservation and try with fewer VMs to see what happens.

Also, could this have anything to do with ESXi's swap (scratch) partition?

It's only 512MB (I do not overcommit RAM). Should it be larger?

I do not own the hardware, I rent it from a very large company (I don't know if I'm allowed to say here which, but I suppose the hardware is fully tested and functional).

It's been running for less than a week now, and the stats are:

Processor	Intel Xeon E3 1245v2
Cores/Threads	4 cores/ 8 threads
Frequency	3.4 GHz+
RAM	32 GB DDR3
Disks	3 x 120 GB SSD

And I've been running 6 VMs with 800-2800MHz, All Locked RAM (3GB) and 30GB Thick Storage Partitions.

ESXi has been installed automatically by my provider. (they do it for thousands of other customers, I suppose there couldn't be an issue with their installer, right?)

[ashleymilne]

Its not likely there is an issue with their installer, just the VM's are crashing, not Esxi itself, correct?

[dezaxatul]

Yes, that's correct.

ESXi itself has no problem (as far as I can tell). It never crashed and there are no hardware / software warnings (again, as far as I can tell).

Only the VMs crash. When I log back into the VM I get a message saying that the OS crashed due to a Blue Screen. I didn't see any error codes otherwise I would have checked online.

Could it actually be due to the 800MHz reservation I had in place? (removed that and no problems so far but it's been only a few hours).

[ashleymilne]

Have you checked the event logs on the various servers? They might shed some light on what is going on.

[dezaxatul]

Yes, I did. There's nothing wrong except:

"Warning message on [VPS] on [IP] in ha-datacenter: Insufficient video RAM. The maximum resolution of the virtual machine will be limited to 1672x1254. To use the configured maximum resolution of 2560x1600, increase the amount of video RAM allocated to this virtual machine by setting svga.vramSize="16384000" in the virtual machine's configuration file."

Which I don't think it the issue.

[ashleymilne]

I was referring to the windows event logs on the servers running Server 2008R2, since they are crashing, perhaps the event logs will have some information.

[admin]

Hi ,

Do you have any vShield Endpoint in the Environment.?

--Avinash

[homerzzz]

Do you have the DMP files from the BSOD? Are you able to run them through Windbg or bluescreenview? Maybe a screenshot of the BSOD may help us.

Do you have vmtools installed on the VMs? Is it the full install?

What does your hardware configuration for the VMs look like? eg. Is the network adapter E1000...SCSI adapter type etc.

[dezaxatul]

No, I don't have vShield Endpoint in the Environment.

I found this in Event Viewer:

"VMDebug driver (version 7.3.4.7) was not enabled.  This driver is required by the replay debugging feature of VMware Workstation. If you are using other VMware products or not using replay debugging, please ignore this message."

And this is one of the DMP files:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/48854464/090714-7784-01.dmp

The configuration is: VMXNET 3 & LSI Logic SAS

Thank you very much for your support