vcenter too slow

[raj07]

Hello all,

I have Vsphere installed on my laptop . 2 ESX 4.0 servers are running as VMs iside worksation 6.5 . When performing vmotion i get this error " A genaral system error occured . Invalid fault" .

I looked at the vmware.log ( also attached) and could not find anything other than timed out when transitioning from state 1 to 5.

I have another question as well.

When i installed the VM inside esx, i have given datastore as the local esx hard drive ( dont get any other option to choose iscsi ) . Then when storing the .vmdk file of VM i select raw device mapping as in the attached figure and select the 5.8 GB LUN which is an openfiler disk partition.

Is this the correct way to choose iscsi Luns ?

1 ) Fig 1 shows the provisioned storage as 5.8 Gb and it shows as " Not shared" . It should be shared Rt?

PS : i have IBM T400 with 2.4 core 2 duo and 4 GB 1033 MHZ ram ( have enabled VT in bios) . The VC server is given 1 GB ram . Logging to esx or vcenter using VIC is very slow ( takes about 4-5 minutes and sometimes times out ) . Is this the normal behavior ?

Thanks

[weinstein5]

The thing to keep in mind is you are running your vSphere environment inside a virtual environement so you are going to take perfomance hits form the underlying operating system and the Workstation 6.x - so to answer your question "is this normal behavior ?" for this environment possibly - what is your laptop doing in addition to running Workstation? Do you have anyother applications running? How much RAM do you have assigned to the VMs hosting ESX? Is the VC machine virtual? Are you trying to connect to it from the laptop? - all of these can be taking resources forcing the ESX servers into contention over RAM and CPU - which can affect vMotion -

In terms of setting up the RDM that looks fine -

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[mvoss18]

Try increasing memory for vCenter. The requirements in the documenation is 3GB. Try upping memory to 2GB and see if there is an improvement. I've ran vCenter 4.0 run as a VM with 1GB on ESX and performance was bad--it improved after upping it to 2GB.

[raj07]

Thanks for your answers .Looks like not only a time out issue. When i try to do a cold migration i get the error " Object or item referred could not be found". after cold miration i am selecting ' Change host'.

I have 3 questions

1) As in the attached files when i create a VM inside esx the datastore is shown as 8.75 Gb vmfs3 partition which is the local esx server hard disk.. Then later the disk file storage there is the option of selecting a Raw device mapping where i select the vmhba33 . It also shows as " Not shared".

Why dont we have an option of using the Openfiler Lun as a Vmfs3 volume ? and why dont we see it as shared?

2) I read somewhere that iscsi targets are named by Vmhab32 whereas in my case it is vmhba33 . Is that ok ?

3) Esx1 sees the iscsi Lun as vmhba33:C0T0L0 whereas ESX2 sees it as Vmhaba33:C0T1L0. Is that ok when we do a migration ?

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

Creating a VMFS datastore on a SAN is really a multistep process -

1. First you need to carve a LUN out on the storage system - it must be less than 2 TB

2. From an ESX server go to storage adapters on the configuration tab for the server and rescan your SANs - if everything is configured the storage now should be visible in the available sotrage

3. No select the storage option from configuration tab f the same ESX server and click add storage which will start the add storage wizard allowing you to create the VMFS datastore

4. On any other ESX servers sharing this datastore you will need to repeat the rescan step so those ESX servers can see the datastore -

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[raj07]

I had done the follwoing steps

1) Lun carved .

2) iscsi initiator step ( send targets)

3) In storage adapter under each ESX server i scanned and found the target .

4) Created the virtual machine ( Since the LUN was not showing under datastore, i chose Raw device mapping)

So you are saying that i did miss one step ?

PS : Now when i go to storage -> add disk --.LUN , i dont see the LUN where my virtual machine is installed ( ok under storage adapter scan). see some other LUNS which are given to mail server. ( Probably i have to recreate it ?)

Thanks