hanging vms

[dhedges]

Recently we are starting to suffer from some of our vm's hanging.

They do not respond to pings, remote desktop, vm console etc...

I have tried using vcenter to power cycle them or even just shut down but it times out.

I have tried the vmware-cmd stop, stop hard etc....

vm-support -X also fails to kill off the vm world

As a last resort I have even tried kill -9 on the pid and even that fails to kill it.

In order to get access back to these vm's I have had to resort to doing a reboot of the host in order to kill them off.

After reading various forums this seems to occur to others aswell but appears that using one of the methods above normally works.

Any suggestions on this as it is happening more frequently.

Thanks

[khughes]

I would start to look at some of the reasons why your VM's might be hanging. Where are these VM's sitting? Local storage? SAN? If it's on a SAN how is the traffic moving between the hosts and the SAN? Is it on just one host or multiple hosts, multiple different VM's or the same VM's hanging? Since some of the methods to kill the virtual machine aren't working I would look to try and find the source that's causing them to hang.

• Kyle

[AndreTheGiant]

Give also some details on the type of VMs and your infrastructure.

Andre

[escapem2]

yes more details would be good like

when this happens what is going on your virtual infraestructure?

all the time same time? when users start using services? after lunch? any time?

high networking usage?

Databases activities?

Antivirus running?

backups running?

I mean I had massive issue on VMs freezzing it was a Storage issue

I also recommend you to read some docs like th one below to start troubleshooting VMs in order to check DAVG - CPU Ready - Net packets Lost any of those could be impacting your Virtual infra

some docs

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/esxtop/

I learned a lot reading these 2

http://communities.vmware.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/10352-1-28235/vsphere4-performance-troubl...

regards

[dhedges]

Hi thanks for the suggestions will review the docs.

Some more info.

Using local storage.

Windows 2003 server images all built from same template.

This is a demo / development environment so workload is minimal.

It was happening on 1 particular image which when I moved it to another host hasn't happened to that image since. It is now happening on some different images which previously were ok.

It is all happening on 1 host so I was also wondering if the host may be goign faulty although I can't see any alarms other than the battery icon which alerts occasionally and then goes back to normal.

I'm going to put all latest patches on tonight although since reboot earlier the 3 images which wouldn't shut down will no longer start up.

Of course it would happen to images which are not backed up. Asked for, turned down.