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ciberjohn
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copying files over two wk2012r2 guest vm's crashes esxi 5.5

Hello.

I'm sorry for the short explanation, but I'm trying to sort out a strange issue.

I have a customer where I recently installed an exsi 5.5 and then 3 windows 2012 r2 essentials as vms. All went well..all running from days with zero issues. Today the software house team had to start to work and they started to do something as simple as copying folders over CIFS. VM's are at the same esxi host and same datastore. As soon as they hited paste on the destination from the copy, it crashed the Esxi host! Never seen this happening before...anyone with the same issue ?

The setup is an IBM server ( 3650 M4 )

with 16Gbs of ram and a datastore made from a 4 SAS IBM 10k disks mounted on a raid 5 with a total of 835GB. I only have 56GB free now because I distributed the space between the virtual disks for the vms.

vmwarecrash.jpg

O wonder if this as happened to any one of you ?

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Linjo
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This is a known problem, Workaround: shift to vmxnet3 (after install) or disable RSS in driver

// Linjo

Best regards, Linjo Please follow me on twitter: @viewgeek If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

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Linjo
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This is a known problem, Workaround: shift to vmxnet3 (after install) or disable RSS in driver

// Linjo

Best regards, Linjo Please follow me on twitter: @viewgeek If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
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OscarDavey
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Yes you have to disable Receive Side Scaling .

RSS is a mechanism which allows the network driver to spread incoming TCP traffic across multiple CPUs, resulting in increased multi-core efficiency and processor cache utilization. If the driver or the operating system is not capable of using RSS, or if RSS is disabled, all incoming network traffic is handled by only one CPU. In this situation, a single CPU can be the bottleneck for the network while other CPUs might remain idle.

Note: To make use of the RSS mechanism, the hardware version of the virtual machine must be 7 or higher, the virtual network card must be set to VMXNET3, and the guest operating system must be capable and configured properly. On some systems it has to be enabled manually. These operating systems are capable of using RSS:

  • Windows 2003 SP2 (enabled by default)
  • Windows 2008 (enabled by default)
  • Windows 2008 R2 (enabled by default)
  • Linux 2.6.37 and newer (enabled by default)

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ciberjohn
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Hi.

The RSS issue makes perfect sense to me once I have a single physical CPu environment.

I'll let you know after the changes if the problem was mitigated. I'll do them later on this evening.

Thanks in advance!

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Aiden1
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Hi

Welcome to the communities.

Following Linjo suggestion I am able to over come this .

Confidence is preparation. Everything else is beyond your control
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ciberjohn
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well..disabling RSS did not solve this one out....I'll try to change the virtual NICs hardware....

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ciberjohn
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ok..changing to vmxnet 3 sort out this issue Smiley Happy Thank you all!

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