ChicaneUK Tracker

Re: Clients disconnect momentarily during vmotion of UAG

ChicaneUK — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 10:36:21 GMT

I have to admit, I'm sort of in disbelief that this was an official response from VMware. For them to not support one of the core technologies of their core product (ESXi) on an appliance they ship, and not least an appliance that isn't even particularly large when things like Virtual Centre, etc will all vMotion quite happily, is hard to accept.

I really hope the team behind the UAG are actively working on addressing this in a future release as suggesting deployment of another UAG onto another host as your 'live migration' solution is bordering on comical.

Re: Image Compliance CPU not supported

ChicaneUK — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 10:50:21 GMT

Did you anywhere with this, with VMware at all? We have the same warning on some hosts with the E5-4650 v3 even though it is a currently supported CPU (though deprecated for future releases) - so why doesnt' Lifecycle Manager support it, if it's supported?

https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/detail.php?scat=cpu&productid=105&deviceCategory=server&details=1&partner=41&releases=578&cpuSeries=105&page=1&display_interval=10&sortColumn=Partner&sortOrder=Asc

Re: Client Drive Redirection is Slow to Start

ChicaneUK — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 12:37:28 GMT

Did you ever get to the bottom of this problem? Thanks.

Re: Status of native M1 / Apple Silicon Horizon View Client?

ChicaneUK — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 12:45:38 GMT

Interested to know this as well. Aside from Teams, it's about the only app I use on a regular basis without Apple Silicon support. Any word from VMware on this?

Can't command line upgrade the Horizon Agent?

ChicaneUK — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 13:49:38 GMT

I seem to be having an issue with command line upgrade of the Horizon Agent on some persistent desktops. I'm doing this as I have a number to do, and I would rather not have to log into each of them to do the upgrade manually.

I've found that if upgrading the version of the client from something older (e.g. 7.12), the upgrade process will work just fine when launched (for example) using the following syntax:

VMware-Horizon-Agent-x86_64-7.13.1-19067315.exe /S /V"/qn VDM_VC_MANAGED_AGENT=1 ADDLOCAL=Core,SVIAgent,RTAV,ClientDriveRedirection,VmwVaudio,VmwVidd,BlastUDP"

However executing the exact same command line syntax on a guest with either 7.13.0 or the log4j vulnerable version of 7.13.1 on it, the process appears to run but doesn't seem to complete. The log output located in C:\ProgramData\VMware\logs seems to suggest it did the upgrade however it doesn't reboot, and even after a reboot you can see in the Connection Server that the version of the agent is still the existing version.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Is the only solution to, basically, uninstall the existing version of the agent and reinstall from fresh?

Re: ping loss vmware tools 11

ChicaneUK — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 10:14:15 GMT

I notice that VMware Tools 11.0.6 is out though no mention of a fix nor any acknowledgement that it's a known issue.. which seems a bit sneaky to me!

Re: ping loss vmware tools 11

ChicaneUK — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 07:32:08 GMT

My ticket went through standard support and has now been passed to the NSX support group although my last contact from them was on Friday morning. I replied later in the same day and have yet to have a response from them, which is a little disappointing.

Re: ping loss vmware tools 11

ChicaneUK — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 09:39:24 GMT

Another user experiencing this exact same issue with 11.0.5 tools, on Windows 10 desktops. A colleague found unloading the Network Introspection Driver resolves the issue for us, or alternatively stopping and disabling the vnetWFP service will immediately rectify the issue. I'd be interested to hear the output of any of these tickets with VMware.. does anyone have any updates / progress? I've opened one myself this morning.

Re: vSphere client 6.0 going to internet

ChicaneUK — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 15:33:04 GMT

Did anything ever happen with this? Did you get a workaround from VMware? Having the same problem with vSphere 6.0 client... 5.5 does not exhibit this behaviour. Thanks.

Re: vSphere 5.5 VM console access errors / MKS connection terminated by server & MKS malformed repsonse from server

ChicaneUK — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 19:12:29 GMT

Through extremely weird coincidence we ran into this exact same problem last night - thought it was about to take down an entire cluster. HP's damn software strikes again. As has been said, an update to the AMS package fixes this. Or stop and disable it if you don't need it.

Re: HP DL360 G8 ESXi 5.5.0 189274 PSOD LINT1 NMI, Sensor Issues, iLO 4 Firmware predating 1.51,

ChicaneUK — Fri, 22 Aug 2014 06:56:18 GMT

Extremely useful post - thanks. Just had one of my 560 Gen8's go out this morning with a 'LINT1' PSOD before realising that whole cluster is still running ILO4 1.40 firmware. Have updated the affected host and just rebooting it now! Need to get the rest done ASAP I suppose!

Re: Lots of "User root@127.0.0.1 logged in" messages

ChicaneUK — Thu, 16 May 2013 08:04:54 GMT

Bingo. I stopped the service, the logging in has stopped. Will have to see what impact this has on stuff like ILO, the health monitoring of the host in Virtual Centre, etc and decide whether we can disable it permanently.

We only use ILO for remote management in the event of a problem with the host and dont use it to scrape alerts out or anything so... I don't think it'll be a big loss for us.

Thankyou!

Re: Lots of "User root@127.0.0.1 logged in" messages

ChicaneUK — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 08:57:27 GMT

Interestingly we just put in a new cluster of DL560 Gen8's and are seeing this occurring on all four of these new hosts. We don't see it occurring on other older generation HP hardware running the same version of ESX, controlled by the same Virtual Centre. Our suspicion is the HP Offline Bundle which I updated on these hosts, to the most recent version whereas the other hosts are running an older version?

Re: ESX 4.1U1 / Windows 2008R2 VM - Networking Problem..

ChicaneUK — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:12:00 GMT

It turned out to be a Cisco problem.

Three servers which were part of the cluster, were connected to ports where Port Security and other such features had been disabled. The new standalone host was connected to ports where Port Security was still active. When moving a VM onto (or from) the standalone host, it tripped up the port security system which was detected a MAC address moving without the link state on the originating port changing (i.e. not going down) and it blackholed that MAC.

Port Security disabled and everything works as it should now!

ESX 4.1U1 / Windows 2008R2 VM - Networking Problem..

ChicaneUK — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:22:44 GMT

Ran into a new and interesting problem today - something I've never seen before despite running an infrastructure with several hundred VM's.

We were upgrading a colleagues 3.5 cluster to 4.1. A nice simple setup - 3 (identical) nodes in a cluster, no clever networking or anything. We setup a 4th node on similar hardware (DL380 G5) and put a new Virtual Centre and SQL 2008 R2 database backend (both Windows Server 2008 R2) on there and proceeded to upgrade all the other cluster nodes. 3.5 / 4.1 mixed mode cluster worked fine and then we got the last host upgraded to 4.1 this afternoon all working fine. We kept this new 4th node outside of the cluster.

The fourth node, whilst a DL380 G5 like the three in a cluster has a slightly different CPU stepping, and generation..

We then attempted to VMotion the VC / DB servers off onto one of the 3 cluster nodes. They dropped off the network and we lost the Virtual Centre. We connected directly to the console of affected host and could see the VM had migrated happily but that the Network was no longer functioning. We completely shut down the VM and restarted it and networking still wouldn't come back up. Strange. We shut it down and cold migrated it back onto the original node and it worked fine again. We cold migrated it again back onto one of the cluster nodes - still nothing. We were assuming some kind of vSwitch uplink issue but we migrated another sacrificial VM from within the cluster onto the node and it was fine...

The upshot was we had to basically delete and create a new vNic within the two VM's to get them back on the network - and now both seem absolutely fine. Am slightly confused. It's almost as if some kind of element of the hardware of the original host that the VM's were created on had been carried over with the VM?

I would suspect ARP gremlins or something but as I say, we have 10 or so vSphere clusters and VMotion and migrating hosts has never yet given us any problems.. so I'm pretty baffled.

Anyone seen this before? I've searched around but found nothing of use...

Re: NFS across a router - Is this OK?

ChicaneUK — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:39:50 GMT

I do this for backing up a few random ESX hosts using VDR - the storage is on NFS on a different VLAN but over gigabit. Hasn't hiccuped once yet after 4 or so months.

Re: Disk out of space - best practices

ChicaneUK — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:41:27 GMT

You can do this using standard Windows tools, without the need for any reboots or interruptions to service. Once you've grown the LUN on the Storage Array end, and once the VMFS has been grown to fill the additional space, then you need to increase the size of the relevant VMDK file. Once that's done, log into the Windows server and in Computer Management rescan your storage and verify that your disk has jumped from 100GB to 200GB and now the partition is only half the size of the disk.

Then open a command prompt as an administrator, and type diskpart and hit enter. You should be taken to a DISKPART> prompt.

Type list volume to see a list of all volumes on the system..

Once you identify which volume it is you wish to grow, select it by typing select volume x (where x is your volume number.. e.g. select volume 3) and then simply type extend.

This will instantly grow the volume to use all available disk space. Then simply exit out of diskpart by typing exit

Obviously you should test this on a sacrificial / test VM first if you're not sure but I'm sure you'll find it works as it should

Re: Changing RAID controllers in MSCS cluster VMs from Virtual to Physical scsi bus sharing

ChicaneUK — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:30:09 GMT

Does your storage array have any kind of snapshot functionality? Could be a safe way to do this without risking losing data.

IIRC you can switch between them or you might possibly have to removed and re-add the RDM with the correct mode - but you shouldn't lose any data.

SLES11 SP1 VM Network Failing..

ChicaneUK — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:57:53 GMT

We've got an unusual problem with a SLES 11 SP1 x64 VM. We use it as a destination for backups for one of the popular snapshot based VMware backup utilities, and for some reason it's recently started having a problem where networking just stops working when network and disk IO / throughput are at their highest.. at around 8.30pm on Friday when we start our full backup run.

The symptoms are pretty unexciting - IP based networking just stops working. Nothing is logged within Linux as far as I can tell and there are no horrible error messages occuring anywhere - networking just, quietly, seems to stop working. Consequently, all our backups fail. If I console into the VM and restart networking with "service network restart" the network stops & starts and the host is back on the network with no problems.

It seems to indicate some problem with the vmxnet3 driver though I've not attempted using vmxnet2 or e1000 yet...

Has anyone encountered this? VMware version that the host this is running on is vSphere 4.0 U2. Looking at performance charts, the VM doesn't seem to be overly stressed or anything terrible despite being quite busy so I'm at a loss to explain this.

Cheers.

Re: Another DL385 G7 PSOD..

ChicaneUK — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 11:08:48 GMT

Hi Jez...

We got a workaround from HP which I wouldn't call a proper fix, but which does seem to have worked for us. We've not had a single PSOD on this system since following this advice from HP. The steps are as follows (verbatim from HP):

1.press the F9 key when prompted during the startup sequence 2.Select Power Management Option > Power Regulator Mode >OS Control Mode.

3.Minimum Processor Idle power State to No C_States.

4.Now in vSphere Client Host Configuration panel. There are four Power Management policies available:- a)High Performance, Balanced, Low Power and Custom.

5.Choose High Performance

6.Select System Option

7. Set Ultra Low Power State: Disable and Low Power Halt State: Disable.

It's not entirely satisfactory as you're basically turning off all the power saving / low power stuff so the power consumption will jump.. but until they fix it in firmware / software (assuming they ever do) this should work in the mean time.

Hope this helps.