VM's Black Screening

[TG11]

I have ESX 3.0.1 server installed on a handful of machines. One of my machines has 11 vm's running and hardly pushing the box. Yesterday, 3 of the vm's had a black screen which says:

PXE-E53: No boot filename received

PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel PXE ROM

Operating System not found

I restarted each of the vm's and they came up ok. We are running Windows 2003 Server as the OS.

Any ideas ?

Thanks!

[pdrace]

Sounds like a disk issue, what type of storage is in use?

[chandlm]

Do you have any management software running on those (Altiris, SMS, etc.?).

I don't want to say it is not possible, but I haven't personally seen that happen on it's own. Usually I have seen that when I (by mistake) sent reboot commands for a server to boot up into PXE for a rebuild but didn't have the PXE pieces set up yet during my testing.

Also, is there anything similar about those 3? Same VMFS volume (different from the others), different network, etc...? Was it possible they received updates and rebooted but the disk wasn't available for some reason as mentioned above?

Message was edited by:

chandlm

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Are you using a SAN - if so there may have been a disconnect. Have you taken a look at the vmware.log files in the VM folders for one of the 3 that failed?

[TG11]

We are using a SAN IBM DS4800. The SAN admin just told me he updated the disk controllers one at a time yesterday at about this timeframe. I have 2 fibre cards on the esx host. I'm thinking that maybe I don't have those hba's setup for failover but then again why wouldn't all 11 vm's have crashed not just 4 .

I ran the following to check for failover:

\[esx 1] /vmfs/volumes/HQ_DS4800_LUN1/tkcsadm1 # esxcfg-mpath -l

Disk vmhba0:0:0 /dev/sda (69890MB) has 1 paths and policy of Fixed

Local 1:2.0 vmhba0:0:0 On active preferred

Disk vmhba1:0:0 /dev/sdb (489472MB) has 2 paths and policy of Most Recently Used

FC 6:1.0 210000e08b8b8fe1<->203400a0b8265350 vmhba1:0:0 On active preferred

FC 8:1.0 210000e08b8b56de<->201500a0b8265350 vmhba2:0:0 Standby

Disk vmhba1:0:1 /dev/sdc (486400MB) has 2 paths and policy of Most Recently Used

FC 6:1.0 210000e08b8b8fe1<->203400a0b8265350 vmhba1:0:1 On active preferred

FC 8:1.0 210000e08b8b56de<->201500a0b8265350 vmhba2:0:1 Standby

Disk vmhba1:0:2 /dev/sdd (512000MB) has 2 paths and policy of Most Recently Used

FC 6:1.0 210000e08b8b8fe1<->203400a0b8265350 vmhba1:0:2 On active preferred

FC 8:1.0 210000e08b8b56de<->201500a0b8265350 vmhba2:0:2 Standby

Disk vmhba1:0:3 /dev/sde (460800MB) has 2 paths and policy of Most Recently Used

FC 6:1.0 210000e08b8b8fe1<->203400a0b8265350 vmhba1:0:3 Standby preferred

FC 8:1.0 210000e08b8b56de<->201500a0b8265350 vmhba2:0:3 On active

Disk vmhba1:0:4 /dev/sdf (455680MB) has 2 paths and policy of Most Recently Used

FC 6:1.0 210000e08b8b8fe1<->203400a0b8265350 vmhba1:0:4 On active preferred

FC 8:1.0 210000e08b8b56de<->201500a0b8265350 vmhba2:0:4 Standby

I'm new to this and I'm not sure what I'm seeing here. Can someone help me out with this?