Odd guest behavior after host upgrade

[zenking]

I've blown away our VI3 esx 3.5 hosts and installed new esxi 4.1 hosts, plus the new vcenter. I legged in the new hosts, reconnected to the cluster and moved VMs (mostly Suse, a few Windows) from old hosts to new. I ran the vmware tools upgrade last night. I've seen a few odd things on the linux guests. The time on a couple of them got way out of whack (4 hours). I rebooted one and it failed to boot. Adding the noapic option seemed to fix it, but then I got a video mode error. I got past that. Then some web services didn't come up. I reconfigured and got it to work, but I'm afraid there might be other gremlins lurking.

I wonder if I should just remove the VMs and recreate from the existing vmdk files. Any thoughts on that?

Thanks.

[gdavid]

Not 100% but i believe the upgrade of VMware tools may have changed some of the virtual 'hardware' components on your VMs and some drivers. This is probably the problem you are facing. Maybe try to run the vmware-tools-config.pl script again.

[zenking]

OK, I'll try that. Thanks.

[idle-jam]

i will also assume that you have upgrade your virtual hardware to version 7 .. this step is important too ..

[zenking]

I had not upgraded the virtual hardware, so thanks for catching that. However, I did that last night. I fixed the web problem, which was the vmware tools thinprint issue, but the network speed is really slow. FWIW, I'm also using an iscsi san that's clustered between 2 nodes, but I'm not seeing much speed difference between copying files up to an iscsi volume and copying directly to a folder on the VM's local disk.

The reason I asked if I should recreate the VM is because we moved some servers to a new cluster and san by copying the vmdk files and recreating the VM from those. In those cases, there does not appear to be any problem with the new VMs. I'd only like to do that if I really need to because of the downtime.

By the way, the hardware where I'm having the problem is fully supported by vsphere 4.1 (Dell Poweredge 2950s and EQ PS5000e).

Thanks.

[AndreTheGiant]

By the way, the hardware where I'm having the problem is fully supported by vsphere 4.1 (Dell Poweredge 2950s and EQ PS5000e).

Remember to upgrade firmware as well as software.

For Eql use at least the 5.0.2 firmware, for the PE check on web site.

Andre

[zenking]

OK. I updated the PE firmware last week, but the EQ is at 4.3.7 and it looks like 5.0.7 just came out, so I'll plan to update that tonight. Thanks.

[zenking]

Just wanted to update about the speed issues. I upgraded my EQ array firmware to 5.0.2 last night. It went smoothly, but didn't fix the speed problem, so I removed the vmxnet 2 nics from the VMs and replaced with the e1000 and my speeds are back to normal. I didn't have the e1000 choice for suse when we were on the esx 3.5 hosts, so that's a nice upgrade for us.

Thanks for all the help.