VM unresponsive

[HerrRaus]

Hi all,

We're currently facing an issue with one of our virtual machines (our fileserver to be more exact).

At random intervals this server becomes unresponsive, I can take over the machine, i can access all it's shares and everything seems to be OK. But all our users (about 300 of them) get disconnected and start working "offline" (this is due to the fact that their personal drive is on this server).

We've monitored the traffic and once this issue occurs all the traffic on this machine stops.

We've recreated this VM numerous times, we've moved this VM across different ESX hosts but still no joy.

So atm we're unsure as to what the issue is, we've ruled out the setup of the fileserver itself due to the fact that we've rebuild the machine with different OS and different architectures (x86, x86_64)

The follow messages appear from time to time in /var/log/vmware/hostd.log

'vm:/vmfs/volumes/48773e79-2978ee59-e7db-001f29649772/antwsfl03/antwsfl03.vmx' 22043568 info] State Transition (VM_STATE_ON -> VM_STATE_RECONFIGURING)

'vm:/vmfs/volumes/48773e79-2978ee59-e7db-001f29649772/antwsfl03/antwsfl03.vmx' 22043568 info] State Transition (VM_STATE_RECONFIGURING -> VM_STATE_ON)

'vm:/vmfs/volumes/48773e79-2978ee59-e7db-001f29649772/antwsfl03/antwsfl03.vmx' 37608368 info] Ticket issued for mks connections to user: vpxuser

The files are stored on an HP EVA4400 SAN system.

Any help will be appreciated.

Thank you.

Kind Regards,

Tom

[AndreTheGiant]

Which kind of OS are you using for the VM?

Andre

[HerrRaus]

Hey Andre,

we're currently using Windows Server 2008 Standard 64bit, but we've used Windows Server 2003 x86 and Windows Server 2003 x86_64, all with the same problems..

I've suggested moving to a Linux fileserver, but my management is hesitant

[AndreTheGiant]

I've got similar problem with some old unsupported Linux distro.

Be sure to have enoght resources, and to have the last updated of ESX.

Andre

[virtuallysi]

I assume you have other virtual machines running on the same ESX host? Whats the network setup for your virtual machines? Are there any virtual machines using the same NIC's? Using the same VLAN? Using the same phyiscal switch? Do you see any dropped packets or any errors? Login to the service console ifconfig | grep "error". What about VMotion to another ESX host?