ESX4 VM intermittantly loosing network connectivity

[mascio]

Greetings.

I have an ESX4 server that has a VM that looses network connectivity on an intermittant, but frequent basis. Running PINGs, I have observed that no matter if I am pinging from a VM host on the same server, or from another, external host, the VM will suddenly have ping times in the 1-3 or more, second range, while the server stays <1ms. At this time, I am unaware of any of my other VMs on same ESX server having the same difficulty.

All of the virtual HW matches, excluding disk size. We have even dedicated CPU to the VM, due to it's critical nature in our operation. The VM runs Windows 2003 R2.

Any pointers?

TIA,

JRSM

[kjb007]

What is the server doing at this time? I've had similar issues when disk latency increased significantly. Is your vm on a shared VMFS? Can you check your disk latency?

-KjB

[mascio]

Trying to research that. It is a shared file system on an iSCSI SAN. The software to monitor that was not installed, and I'm trying to lay my hand on it. We were wonding if that might be the problem, or part of it, but had no validation. Thanks for the validation. I'll keep looking for the SW.

JRSM

[kjb007]

You can also use ESX to monitor this during the event. Go to the ESX server in question, go to performance tab, select the Advanced view, change chart options, disk, select real-time, and in the counters, remove all, and add Physical device read latency, physical device write latency, physical device command latency.

-KjB