VMWare ESX 3.5 hosts keep disconnecting

[AshM]

Hi,

I'm experiencing an issue with my production ESX farm. Let me briefly explain my setup…I am running a single Virtual Center server (Physical) with SQL 2005 STD edition and a number of Datacenters. The datacenter in question here is my production datacenter, it has six ESX3.5 (various updates) Servers in the farm (all 64GB with 16 CPU cores). I am experiencing rather a lot of host unavailable or disconnected messages reported in the log but curiously enough only for the ESX01 – ESX04 servers, the other two servers seem fine. ESX01 is at U3, ESX02 is at U5, ESX03 is at U3, ESX04 is at U1 the other two ESX servers are at U5. I can ping all my servers by their FQDNs. This seems to have only just started happening. Trouble is whenever I look at the issue in Virtual Centre the host has reconnected itself again.

Any feedback would be appreciated
Many Thanks in advance
Ash

[EVW]

I would try to get statistics from your physical switch. Are there any errors reported on the switchports connected to ESX 1 to ESX 4 ? I think you also need to take a close look at the configuration of the physical switch and ports.

[AshM]

Thanks for the idea, fortunately the switch ports look ok, I couldn't find any errors, just a couple of dropped packets but there has been loads of disconnections. Any other ideas would be greatly received.

Ash

[DSTAVERT]

Check disk space on the hosts that are disconnecting. Possible you are out of space. Check the logs.

[AshM]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I have checked the space on one of the hosts that is having an issue and the local space seems fine.

Ash