One VM randomly locks

[dctaylorit]

I have a VM that randomly crashes. When the VM does lock up, it completely hard locks. There are no errors in the eventlog on the VM. If I try to power it down through VC it will hang. I have to Vmotion everything to another host and then power down the host that was running the locked VM. It only happens to this one VM.

It happened once or twice a week before I upgraded to ESX -3.0.2. After I performed the upgrade to 3.0.2 it has worked fine until the other day when it experienced the same issue of hard locking (Probally 6-8 weeks). If I remember correctly I made the upgrade shortly after 3.0.2 was released. I haven't applied any further patches because I don't believe that they were related to my issues/systems.

My system specs are as follows:

VC - 2.0.2

ESX - 3.0.2

Hosts - HP DL360 G5 - 2x5150 Procs 10GB Ram

Storage - LeftHand NetworksDL320S iSCSI SAN

Dedicated Gigabit VLAN for iSCSI network

VM

- Win2k3 R2 SP2 64bit

- Running SQL2005 SP2 Enterprise Edition.

I have tried to browse through the log files in \var\log\vmware\host##.log files and haven't been able to find anything thus far that sticks out as an obvious cause.

If there is any more information that I can provide that would be helpful please let me know.

Thanks,

Joe

[wila]

Check the performance stats in the VIC. When selecting the 5 minute statistics you get an overview over the past 24 hours or so. This at least should give you some idea about the load in the VM when it happens again, even after the lock up happened.

Have you checked the logs in the VM itself? Is it a p2v-ed machine and if so have you removed all the agent software?

Is your vmware tools completely up to date?

[virtualdud3]

Does the VM "lock" if it is running on different ESX hosts, or does the VM only lock when it is running on a particular host?

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[wila]

I see i forgot to point you to another log file. Also have a look in the log files that are stored with the VM on the VMFS, those are specific for the VM and might contain some more pointers.