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sgorham
Contributor
Contributor

3.5U3 - any guinea pigs yet?

After the issues that happened with U2 I am curious to see if folks have played with U3 yet. I, for one, won't even think about it for some time

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grndmstr
Contributor
Contributor

some of us prefer production uptime, reducing the cost to the business and less users yelling at us when something is broken rather than being HARDCORE and staying ahead of the curve..

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tolstoy143
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

U3 has rendered my NFS datastores unable to come online after a host reboot, and therefore my VMs will not autostart.

I have a thread in this group. I basically have to refresh my datastores to bring them online, then manually start my VMs.

"Quos vult perdere dementat" Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace"
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240Zeus
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Absolutely! In enterprises where downtime means a potential of millions of dollars of lost revenue, I prefer to actually have my infrastructure functional and use the lab for what it should be used for - learning/testing. If you're learning in your production environment, that is pretty "hardcore" if that's really the word you prefer to describe that practice with. I think some of us would choose a different term.

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Jasemccarty
Immortal
Immortal

Dave,

I put the old settings in my simple.map, and then rebooted the host.

I could then see the controller properly, but couldn't see my VMFS volume.

I then modifed the LVM.EnableResignature = 1 host setting, and rescanned my storage controllers.

I could then see the VMFS volume.

The funny thing is, after another several reboots, the simple.map reverted to the old settings, but I could still see the storage.

Strange.

Jase McCarty

http://www.jasemccarty.com

Co-Author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center

(ISBN:1420070274) from Auerbach

Jase McCarty - @jasemccarty
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twoodland
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Unfortunately, not everyone has lab environments, like the location of my employment. But, when that is the case, it's nice to let those with lab environments hammer on the update for a while before proceeding. I'm not sure how responsible it is to rush into a new release on something supporting business critical applications, certainly not "hardcore."

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peetz
Leadership
Leadership

Hi,

do you have Virtual Machine Monitoring enabled in the HA options?

According to this post this might be a problem in U3. I have not tested this myslf so far. Anyone else?

- Andreas

Twitter: @VFrontDe, @ESXiPatches | https://esxi-patches.v-front.de | https://vibsdepot.v-front.de
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jrglines
Contributor
Contributor

All VM's experienced a forced reset after VMotion so tested it by shutting down a VM, moving it from the U2 to U3 host, and restarting. Same result, forced reset.

Also found the following in the system log of each vm:

Event ID: 44

Windows has detected that the system firmware (BIOS) was updated

previous firmware date = 01/30/08, current firmware date 07/22/08

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williambishop
Expert
Expert

This will eventually bite you in the keester.

--"Non Temetis Messor."
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bitsorbytes
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

@reidg1785 - Do you have auto upgrade of the tools turned on?

It seems a 'bug' that the tools auto upgrade and then restart! Even though the checkbox is called 'Check and upgrade tools before each power-on"

BEFORE each power on doesn't seem to the be the case!

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reidg1785
Contributor
Contributor

That option is diabled on all my VMs.

-Reid

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ief
Contributor
Contributor

I have upgraded 8 VMware ESX hosts to 3.5 Update 3 and VC 2.5 Update 3. We experience the same problem as reidg1785 explianed. After we set DRS to manual and disable Virtual Machine Monitoring the random reboots of the VM's stops. I have created a support request @ VMware, no solution yet.

www.ivobeerens.nl

.

blog www.ivobeerens.nl
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ief
Contributor
Contributor

VMware support told me today that they will relase tommorow patch 10 for Update 3 that fixes some random reboot problems.

www.ivobeerens.nl

blog www.ivobeerens.nl
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ufo8mydog
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I can confirm that we've had the same random reboot issue, the only way to stop it is to disable virtual machine monitoring.

I'll be looking forward to the updated patch, but it does look like VMWare's Q&A team have dropped the ball again on U3.

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deere
Contributor
Contributor

3.5.0 Rlease 3 working fine for two weeks, suddenly yesterday, purple screen with a skb_over_panic message error, server never back on 14 production VM's had to be manually moved to other 3.0.1 Server, still investingating what the heck is going on....head ache..be careful guys !!!!

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deere
Contributor
Contributor

.

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RS_1
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We got the same problem today Smiley Sad

thanks for the workaround guys.

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flook1985
Contributor
Contributor

Jase,

Would you be willing to be bit more descriptive about how you go this to work on you optiplex gx620(I'm a novice ...)? I have 3 of these boxes and would really like to get ESX 3.5 update 3 working on 2 them then use the 3rd for an Openfiler iSCSI box. It would be nice to be able to put a couple of vm's on the host's instead of relying completely on iSCSI...

I don't know what "simple.map" is ...What are the exact changes I would need to make to this?

BTW - I have updated the BIOS to A11

Thanks,

Greg

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ivcjbeaty
Contributor
Contributor

Check this link for first major oops... http://www.ivobeerens.nl/?p=180

I agree testing out new updates is wise, Microsoft has taught us that, but isn't it the responsibility of the OS distributor to do that. I mean they have a lot more resources than a "Joe computer tech" at a small organization like me. On this one I was more cautious after Update 2.

Oh I found this link because my "testing" resulted in the scenario described and the solution worked.

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Jasemccarty
Immortal
Immortal

I am using the A11 bios as well.

Using "unsupported" access to the console in ESXi, I modified "/etc/vmware/simple.map"

Here's a section for the Intel ICH7 controller from ESXi 3.5 U3:

8086:27c0 0000:0000 storage ide

8086:27c1 0000:0000 storage ahci

8086:27c3 0000:0000 storage ahci

8086:27c4 0000:0000 storage ide

8086:27c5 0000:0000 storage ahci

8086:27c6 0000:0000 storage ahci

8086:27df 0000:0000 storage ide

Here's a section for the Intel ICH7 controller from ESXi 3.5 U2:

8086:27c0 0000:0000 storage ata_piix

8086:27c1 0000:0000 storage ahci

8086:27c3 0000:0000 storage ahci

8086:27c4 0000:0000 storage ata_piix

8086:27c5 0000:0000 storage ahci

8086:27c6 0000:0000 storage ahci

8086:27df 0000:0000 storage ide

I modified the values in blue to be the ones in red. Then I rebooted the box.

I could then see the controller properly, but couldn't see my VMFS volume.

I then modifed the LVM.EnableResignature = 1 host setting, and rescanned my storage controllers. (In Configuration/Advanced Settings)

I could then see the VMFS volume, even though it had a different name

Jase McCarty

http://www.jasemccarty.com

Co-Author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center

(ISBN:1420070274) from Auerbach

Jase McCarty - @jasemccarty
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OlivR
Contributor
Contributor

Any news about this patch? Are SP3 files going to be updated?

It looks to me like it's a pretty serious problem, did anybody at VMWare oficially agreed with this problem? Also I think adding a note on the dowload page would be rather useful... Like saying the know bug for the current SP and provide link to the patches.

Olivier

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