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LelandA
Contributor
Contributor

esxi locks up

I am running esxi 4.1.

I have 4 vm's configured.

As long as I only start 2 of the vm's everything works great, 10 minutes after I start either or both of the last two vm's esxi totally locks up and the host becomes unresponsive.

I have to power off the esxi host and restart to activate again.

Any ideas?

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11 Replies
Rumple
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

I will suggest that you test the memory on the host using memtest 86+ or some other memory testing tool...you could be hitting a bad stick of RAM.

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

Welcome to the community.

Your system is in HCL?

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility

How much memory do you have?

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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LelandA
Contributor
Contributor

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

As suggested in the previous post test the memory.

And check also that your system is up-to-date with pathes and firmware.

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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LelandA
Contributor
Contributor

I have upgraded to esxi 4.1.

I also installed the 4.1 patches dated October and November.

I have also installed the latest HP CIM software.

I have run the latest HP firmware cd (9.20b)

I have updated the vmtools on all servers.

I still have the same issue.....running 3 VM's works awesome, bring up that 4th VM esxi locks up within 5 minutes.

i am going to try to run the memtest 4.10 cd during the Christmas break.....it looks like it takes a while to run.

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Rumple
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

I would suspect if you have a memory issue you will hit it pretty quick.

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LelandA
Contributor
Contributor

I let the memtest+ 4.10 run for like 10 minutes and it only got to 1% passed.

I will run it later in December when I can have the server offline for a few hours.

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LelandA
Contributor
Contributor

I have ran memtest86+ v4.10 against this server and it comes back ok.

Any other ideas on why I can only run 2 vm's on this server?

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DSTAVERT
Immortal
Immortal

Any extra setting you might have made to the host or guest beyond as it came in the box. I would check with HP support. Go through the vmware.log files for the VMs that lock. I would also go through the rest of the VMware logs. Download through the client or use the rcli to do a vm-support log capture.

There is an hp NMI offline bundle that will write extra info into the logs. Can help identify hardware issues. Do a search on the HP site for nmi-bundle

-- David -- VMware Communities Moderator
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LelandA
Contributor
Contributor

I am not so sure that this is a hardware issue....

The entire host becomes unresponsive.....I can't ping the esxi interface, I also can't ping any of the servers.

I haven't made any changes to the host at all....

I have called HP support 5 times now and every single test they have me run in "offline" mode doesn't show any problems hardware wise...

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gasdotit
Contributor
Contributor

Hi LelandA,

which kind of OS is installed on those machines?

Does the issue raise with a specific one (or two), or it's not depending on which one is turned on before?

Did you try uninstalling vmtools?

I'm asking this because we had weird issues we "solved" uninstalling the vmtools on a specific VM (see: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/282594?tstart=0 )

Bye,

Marco

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