vSphere 4.1 and Netware 5.1/Groupwise 7

[NeonSurge]

I've just completed a completely problem-free upgrade to vSphere 4.1 across our entire virtualisation infrastructure with the exception of a single VM: It's a legacy machine running Netware 5.1 and Groupwise 7 which, while relatively little-stressed, remains a critical resource for a larger percentage of our users. Since the upgrade, it's been pinned at between 90-100% CPU whereas previously (under 4.0u2) it never exceeded 40% or so. There are no apparent rogue process on the guest OS or in the application and guest reboots don't fix it. I've upgraded to the latest version of VMWare Tools on the guest and the problem persists.

We don't have much in the way of Novell skills round here any more so we're stumbling in the dark a little bit. Can anyone suggest why we're seeing this odd behaviour post-upgrade?

[NeonSurge]

Just to keep this ticking over, I've uninstalled and reinstalled VMWare Tools (and rebooted once again) - this has made no difference to the CPU utilization which remains at 95-100% on both the guest OS and as reported in vCenter.

[dgrace]

Does vsphere show the tools as OK? In the guest at the command line you can do "modules vmwtool.nlm" to make sure it is loaded.

[NeonSurge]

Yes, the tools are installed and running correctly - in fact, I can provide an update to all this:

We couldn't find any issues with the VM configuration, the guest OS/application configuration or ESX itself so we opened a call with VMWare support. After some investigation it looks as through there's a problem running Netware 5.1-based guests under vSphere 4.1 and our enquiry has been escalated to engineering.

In order to mitigate the problem, I've removed one host from our cluster, rebuilt it using 4.0, re-joined the cluster and migrated the Netware servers onto it. As soon as I did that, everything returned to normal. We await further information from VMWare.

Has anyone else run into this issue?

[imclaren]

I see unusually-high CPU utilisation reported in monitor.nlm, but as performance seems to be unaffected, I've just put it down to the tools throttling the CPU usage (or similar).

Our production NetWare servers (file and print only) typically use less than 100Mhz of CPU space, bless them!

[jcwuerfl]

Any thought of upgrading to OES 2 with the SUSE Linux Kernel along with GW8 for that VM?

[pahi]

Same issue in our environment. Which Service Pack is installed on your NetWare 5.1? We have SP6 and NetWare 5.1 is supported in vSphere 4.1 only with SP7 or SP8. Maybe this is the problem.

[NeonSurge]

We're running SP8e so I don't think that's it

We're still working with VMWare support on this one - they've been unable to replicate the issue in their labs so far.

[UOVS]

I'm running nw6 sp5 on about 12 servers and only 2 of the 12 have this issue after upgrading to vSphere 4.1. Interestingly it seems to be servers carrying more replicas that experience the problem. Network performance on the affected servers really blows... I'm considering building a seperate cluster to host the 2 problematic servers. dstrace should show a lot of skulking on affected servers. Time also drifts much more on 4.1 than on 4.0 update2. Help will be much appreciated on this one. High CPU usage on the affected servers also cause poor network performance. Upgrading vmware tools does not help.

[NeonSurge]

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[NeonSurge]

Just to follow up on this one, we're still experiencing the problem on both Netware VMs and have resorted to keeping one of our hosts at 4.0 (unpatched) just to support NW. Fortunately we're in the process of implementing MS Exchange so neither NW guest will be required beyond May this year but it obviously still makes me nervous running a host (very) out of sync with the rest of the cluster.

In a belated response to UOVS, the symptoms you describe are exactly what we're seeing and I'd still be interested in any progress you (or anyone else) has made with this issue.