VMware Cloud Community
ncolyer
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

VMWare ESX Host Keeps locking VM file

We are having a repeated issue with our VMWare View desktop environment on ESX4.

One ESX Host with about 5-6 VM's in it (It's our POC before we move the rest of them over).

Sometimes we are getting VMs freezing on the host. When we try to restart them we get an error saying:

"Unable to access file - unspecified filename - since it is locked"

This is after we try to power them back up. Powering them down often is involving us having to do a kill -9 on the affected VM.

Following the VMWare KB articles, we can verify this ESX host is the one with the lock. We do have other ESX hosts accessing the same SAN LUNS (our old Sun global desktop ESX Hosts which still have VMs on them), but we have migrated VMs from the Sun Hosts to these without a problem. We know the SUN hosts aren't affecting this since the lock is specifed as being on the ESX Host which we want the lock to be on.

The only way to get the VM back up is to actually restart the ESX host.

Please can someone help? The only thing we have found so far is that possibly the same LUN (10) is causing the problem. The 2 VMs that locked up in this way have both been on LUN 10. Everything however checks out on this LUN and the previous ESX farm 3.5 which is still using LUN 10 is not having the VMs freeze like this.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Reply
0 Kudos
4 Replies
AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

Which kind of storage do you have? FC or iSCSI?

How many ESXs?

And how they share some LUNs with SUN hosts? Are this still ESXs?

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
Reply
0 Kudos
PaulSvirin
Expert
Expert

I think this is SAN (if you've got one) concerned issue .

If yes - then have a look at this old thread: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/59041

---

iSCSI SAN software

http://www.starwindsoftware.com

--- iSCSI SAN software http://www.starwindsoftware.com
Reply
0 Kudos
ncolyer
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks for your replies. I actually found another thread which shows VMWare were aware of this issue with View.

http://vmjunkie.wordpress.com/

and

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1483768

It looks like 2 hot fixes came out that might help so we are exploring that over the next 24 hours. Our users are in a different time zone so lets see if we get woken up tonight with more View Desktop issues on ESX.

SAN:

Yes we are using Fiber channel.

We have 3 ESX Servers in using our Sun environment connected to the same LUNs. then we have our 1 new ESX server in the view environment connected to the LUNs also. This has allowed us to import the virtual machines from the old vcenter as we move them across.

I don't think this could cause an issue. The ESX server that is locking the file is the actual one we want it on (the view ESX server) but if someone can confirm that you can't share the same LUNs between different ESX hosts I would be very interested in knowing more and why.

Thanks again for the help so far.

Nick

Reply
0 Kudos
ncolyer
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Same problem today even after the Host Update to the latest build.

We haven't had the locking issue again but we are still getting VMs freezing and having to be reset from vCenter.

Reply
0 Kudos