Running ESXi 4.0. The past two nights the box has locked up and locked up all VM's. I had very limited access to the host via the windows client, and no access to the VM's. I was able to see the last entry in the host event log ‘NVRAM: read failed'. This entry was tied/linked to one of the VM's. I do not know if this was the same error as previous times. Any and all help/suggestions are appreciated.
Problem resurfaced last night. Same error, same virtual machine. Host was unresponsive and required reset button to be pressed. Is it something specific to that VM or is it a bigger issue with the host?
You should post a little more information to help forum members understand the problem.
You could be experiencing disk problems, RAM problems. It could be just an issue with a corrupt NVRAM file. Post some more information. What led up to the problem. Hardware, Software versions, etc etc.
Can you list the hardware spec of the host?
I'd start by running a thorough memory test on the box, for 24 hours.
Please award points to any useful answer.
ESXi 4.0, upgraded from 3.5
1X - Intel S5000PSL
2X - Intel 2.5 GHz Quad Core Xeon
4X - Crucial 4GB, 240-pin DIMM, DDR2 PC2-5300 memory module
1X - Adaptec RAID 5805, running 3 arrays, each in RAID 6
8X - Seagate 750GB SATA
2X - Intel Dual Port NIC
1X - Intel RMM
Adaptec RAID controller is not reporting any issues with the arrays. They are showing as optimal. I have not yet run memtest.
The VM that is displaying the NVRAM error is CentOS running cPanel as a DNS server.
Hi, I have been facing same problem on my ESXi4. It was up and running almost 4 month without any reboot with iSCSI on Windows Storage Server 2008. Problem happend the day before yesterday and I sawed the same messages only on Windows Servers. The other linux system looks OK, but the ESXi Hyper Visor was getting too slow likes over heated. So I decided to do a hardware reset and after 1 day, same problem happened again.
This is the action I did. I did windows update on Windows Storage Server 2008 and rebooted it once all patches were applied
It looks working fine now, and will give a post when I face same problem again.
I can't imaging the nvram file causing the host to become unstable but I suppose anything is possible. The nvram file can be deleted with no ill effects. It is the VM BIOS settings. It will be recreated when the VM is restarted.
I would point the vmware logs to another location so that they are retained after reboot. You can have ESXi write logs to a directory on a datastore. You can do that from the Client in Configuration / Software / Advanced / Syslog.