VMotion from 3.0.1 to 3.5 issue's

[Curdasss]

I am having issue's with vmotion from 3.0.1 servers to 3.5 servers. The actual vmotion works and moves the VM, however, the VM losses network connection for about 5-10 seconds and becomes unresponsive, from the console or SSH session, for about 1-2 minutes. The memory on the VM spikes to and remains at about 90% usage for some time after the VMotion is complete. Before upgrading the one ESX server from 3.0.1 to 3.5, I could VMotion across the servers with no issue what so ever. Any help someone could provide on this issue would be greatly appreciated.

[bradley4681]

Technically VMotioning between the two different versions is sort of a gray area. I would chalk the issue up to the VMware tools being of an older version when migrating to the newer host. you could try upgrading your tools to the version from the new host and then migrate a server from the old host.

to get the tools just start a tools install in a guest from the new host, and copy the contents of the d drive to a network share. then go to a guest on the old host, upgrade, reboot, migrate, etc...

Cheers,

Bradley Sessions

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[Curdasss]

Thanks Bradley, thats what I kinda figured I was just hoping there was somthing I was ignorant about. Thanks for your help.

[abevern]

FWIW - on Friday I added a 3.5 update 1 host to my cluster of 3.0.2 (fully patched as of May) servers. In the last 4 days, I've had two windows 2003 hosts lock up. In both instances they were on the 3.5 box at the time of lock up, and had been DRS migrated both onto and off of the machine in the last 12 hours. Both windows servers are typically fairly heavily loaded. The ESX boxes themselves are running ~30-50% memory and CPU utilisation. I've disabled DRS while I just for possible causes.

If it's an incompatibility issue between 3.0 and 3.5, then I'm happy to upgrade to 3.5, but if it's something to do with the 3.5 install, that'd be a world of pain. Will the latest 3.5 VMWare tools be compatable with 3.0.2, and will this (perhaps) sort the freezing? The only hint of incompatibility I have seen is a warning under manual migration going from 3.0 to 3.5 that says something to the effect of "the virtual machine configuration will be modified to preserve CPU feature requirements". I'm assuming this relates to the Nx flag. Could this be the issue?

I've attempted without success to reproduce the crash with a non-production server using manual migrations, but so far to no avail.

[bradley4681]

As I said in the previous post, it's a bit of a gray area. If your running DRS between to different versions of ESX I would upgrade all the hosts to the same version and make sure the tools on the hosts are upgraded as well. The original poster was just asking about vmotioning those guests to the newer version and whether he needed to upgrade the tools immediatly. Here's that gray area, in your case upgrade, in his I said no.

Cheers,

Bradley Sessions

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