We just upgraded fro ESX3.5 to ESX 4 U1 a few weeks back. We are running on a IBM Blade Center S with HS21-7995 blades and using the SAS RAID Module for Storage.

On two occasion all the ESX hosts stopped responding/VMS were offline  and on console of each Host was displayed - SD 0:0:0:0 still retrying after 360s.

After power cycling  the Blades and  BCS Chassis, everything came back online.

Each hosts has a 20GB volume on the SAS RAID for BOOT  that is mapped to the blade.

This install was stable for over a year  on 3.5 and started this behavior after the upgrade . After the first time this occured I  subsequently reloaded all the hosts with a fresh install of ESX4 U1 after wiping the volume. We experenced this again yesterday morning.

I will likely open a support case with Vmware and I am already talking to IBM as well. Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated.

Hello to all vSphere community.

Has anybody succeded in controlling vSphere through php?

Is vmware going to create api for controlling vms through php?

Thanks

Hi folks.

I have a good sized ESX cluster, with about 20 hosts and Enterprise Plus licensing. I recently did a power down/up of my entire setup, and all but a handful of VMs came back up cleanly. About 5 of my virtual machines came up as "Invalid", and if I try to power them on, I get an error message saying "Failed to find a host for powering on the virtual machine".

Here's what I've tried. I'm working with just one of them now, assuming that once I find the magic bullet for the first one, the rest will be the same.

- Simply removing the VM from inventory and re-adding it (no change)

- Removing it, and adding it to a different cluster (no change)

- Removing it, adding it to a different cluster and different resource pool (no change)

Other VMs in the same datastore, on the same host and on the same resource pool came up with no issues. I'm looking at the vmware.log file in the datastore itself and the last thing that I see in there is the VM shutting down before my power cycle.

I've checked my alarms/settings on my actual hosts, and as far as I can tell it's not an HA issue, but I am definitely in over my head here. My current failover capacity is 9 hosts, and configured failover capacity is set to one host.

The VM itself is a simple config with 2 VCPU and 4GB of ram, and the cluster I'm trying to start it on has 10 hosts, 80 CPUs and 600GB of RAM.

I'm not sure what to try next. I can't edit the settings when I add the VM itself - the setting is not there. (All I have is a power on button, basically)

Any insight would really be appreciated. I'm a relative novice and I'm trying to troubleshoot a production environment as best I can without breaking anything.

Thanks!

Hello.

We're having issues in one environment with some Windows VMs. I'm going to explain the scenario:

Previous scenario:

- All the hosts were ESX 4.0.

- VMs had several E1000 NICs.

- VMware Tools were out of date.

So, we've done an upgrade of those points in this way:

1) Hosts were upgraded to ESX 4.1 u2 through the Update Manager.

2) Every E1000 NIC was replaced by VMXnet3.

3) The last step was upgrade VMware Tools (with the mandatory reset).

After that we're finding issues with some Windows VMs (Server 2003 and 2008): the VM asks for DNS deletion of its A and PTR records every hour until the VM is rebooted.

Running "ipconfig /registerdns" is a temporary solution because the records are created but also deleted because of the behaviour explained above.

The only solution is rebooting the VM... After that its DNS register appears to be OK in the DNS server.

So we need to know the source of the problem (the VMXnet3 driver, the tools upgrade, etc.). I've only found two guys with the same problem and the same solution.

Any ideas?

Thank you very much.

Hi Expert,

I have tried to find out what cause this error to my esx host but to no avail, tried google but can't seems to locate anything related to VMware. Has anyone encountered this error before? FYI, as soon as my host getting this error, it hangs.

Appreciate if someone could assist further in this. Thank you,

Junior ESX System Admin

Hi  @ all

i want to check my esx hosts systems via snmp. (snapshots/drive usage, etc...)

In our environment i use snmpget to fill my "checkssystem" nagios.

So i search for some doc´s to configure it, but everything i found was to old or incomplete.

what i have done?

- enable snmp port in firewall

- start the snmp service

- configured the snmp.xml with the "vicfg-snmp" command from the nagios server..

Can anybody give an short tutorial how to setup the esxhost for snmp?

thx stony007_de

Could anyone explain the difference between the 'vc.uuid' and 'uuid.bios' entries in the guest .vmx file?  Specifically, what is the 'vc.uuid' represent, and how does it get generated?

Hi Everyone,

One of our SQL Servers became completely unresponsive so it was Powered Off.  I know, not exactly the best thing to do, but it's been done and since the VM was Powered On, we're getting an error

BOOTMGR is missing in Windows Server 2008

Ctrl + Alt + Del to reboot

I've done some searching and found a bunch of suggestions to boot from the 2008 image (which I've done) and then use bootmgr or fixmbr / bootrec / etc to restore the OS.  I was able to open a command prompt, however the C:\ isn't available to select, and diskpart / list volume doesn't show C: as a volume, so I'm pretty sure it's not being detected.  I'm not sure why this is, I was thinking that it might have been because we are using the Paravirtual SCSI Controller Type, but that's just a guess

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to resolve this issue?  I think it's a two-tier issue, detect the C:, then fix the bootmgr issue.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

I Also can't connect to the default Webpage of the ESX Host

I have tried to restart the VC agent and the SC with the following commands

service vmware-vpxa restart

service mgmt-vmware restart

I checked the vpxa.log file and there are many errors See Below:

Failed to discover version: vim.fault.HttpFault

Could not resolve version for authenticating to host agent

Creating temporary connect spec: localhost:443

SSLStreamImpl::BIORead (0xcf7c560) timed out

SSLStreamImpl::DoClientHandshake (0xcf7c560) SSL_connect failed with BIO Error

HttpUtil::ExecuteRequest Error in sending request - SSL Exception: The SSL handshake timed out local: 127.0.0.1:40139 peer: 127.0.0.1:443.

Failed to discover version: vim.fault.HttpFault

Could not resolve version for authenticating to host agent

Creating temporary connect spec: localhost:443

SSLStreamImpl::BIORead (0xcf7c560) timed out

SSLStreamImpl::DoClientHandshake (0xcf7c560) SSL_connect failed with BIO Error

Any Ideas?

Hi   

When I browse my data store on one of my VM i have  Windows 208 AD-000002.vmdk file listed  which is 261,600,700,000 long   type virtual disk

i do not have the Windows 2008 AD-Snapshot1.vsm file   and i do not have any snapshots listed in the snapshot tool

i tried to remove the snaphot the other day as i had an outof space error and could not start the machine the whole system appeared to hang and had to restart manually after 2 hrs

am i right to assume that the above file is part of the snapshot that went wrong   If i right click on this file i do have the option to delete it from the disk

can i do this? to regain the space

thank you for any info you can shed

Hi All,

Can anyone tell me what exactly is a vLockstep technology. What exactly it does.

When does this happen, why does it happen? Where and how is it used in Vmware?

Thanks,

J

Hi All,

We have a small cluster of two DELL boxes.

One newer PowerEdge R710 with Intel Xeon 5550 CPU's and one older

PowerEdge 2950 with Intel Xeon 5130 CPU's.

Both run ESX 4.0

both platforms should support 64bit OS's.

When creating a guest I am able to select a for instance Windows 2008 64bit. When I start that machine on my PE 2950, it boots up, loads the windows setup from DVD and shortly there after I get a message saying that it needs a 64bit CPU. ??

Moving the guest over to the other host, everything installs and runs fine. We've seen the same thing with Windows 7 64bit (and probably with all 64bit OS's).

I just rebooted that host and went into the BIOS to see if the CPU was set to support 64 bit, it was. And if the CPU VT technology was enabled, it was.

Still no luck though.

Anyone any idea?

I've  got a cluster of IIS Servers that we host our web application on.  Recently, we converted several of our web servers from physical machines to virtual machines.  By converted, I mean we built a template from scratch and cloned it to create the rest of our Web VMs. 

The server work, but there is a definite and noticable difference between our VMs and our physical machines.  In examining the IIS logs, we found that the time taken to process the request for a certain page we're measuring normally takes about 600 ms to process on a physical server.

On the new VMs, it's closer to 900 ms, which is about 50% slower. 

The physical machines are Windows server 2003 R2 Std x86 servers with 4 GB of memory and 2 quad-core 3Ghz processors.  Our VMs are quad-processor VMs with 8 GB of RAM running Windows Server 2003 x86 Std R2. 

Our first thought was the difference in the processor count, with 8 being in the physical machines vs 4 in the VMs (IIS is a multi-thread-friendly application).  To address this, we built a new Windows 2003 Enterprise R2 Server with 8 vCPUs and put in in the mix.  This new server runs with lower CPU utilization, but the page render time is still the same.

Our cluster is new and is not being heavily utilized.  CPU contention is not an issue. I've even tested by moving one of the web server VMs to it's own host for a day and saw no change.  Our web server admin insists none of these measures have changed anything.

Are there any other settings or options I should look into tweaking to improve this deficiency?  My guess is he's seeing expected overhead from CPU virtualization, but everything I'm reading says we should not see this big of a performance hit.

Thanks!

Hi All,

We have recently implemented ESX4 cluster with 4 hosts. there are 94 VMs in total windows 2008 R2 x64. we have most of the developers so they need a 4 GB RAM on each VM's. Since i upgraded it my all ESX Hosts are running with 85-90 % of memory usage. when i checked the resource usage All VM's it taking all of the RAM assigned to them on Host but the Guest usage is very minimal.

I investigated on many forums and tried everything (changed CPU/MMU virtualization option, DynCache doesnt work on R2) but didnt help at all. i am a bit scared about the usage of memory on my hosts whenever i check the performance tap. Is there any way i can minimize the memory usage or any best way to handle it. Any help and suggestion would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Rajan

I am using veeam to backup and restore VMs and I am not having any problems with other VMs either restoring to the problem host or  on other hosts. The issue is this:

I restore a VM after making a brand new full veeam backup, the backup and restore are successful however the VMs cannot be started on any host. Other VMs of the same OS can be started on the host in question. The vmware.log is as follows:

I can't tell if it's a host problem, a veeam problem or a vmware problem. I am not having issues with other VMs restored to this host though, just the VMs on this host already.

Feb 14 11:55:40.889: vmx| hostCPUID level 80000002, 0: 0x65746e49 0x2952286c 0x6f655820 0x2952286e

Feb 14 11:55:40.889: vmx| hostCPUID level 80000003, 0: 0x55504320 0x20202020 0x20202020 0x45202020

Feb 14 11:55:40.889: vmx| hostCPUID level 80000004, 0: 0x30343635 0x20402020 0x37362e32 0x007a4847

Feb 14 11:55:40.890: vmx| hostCPUID level 80000005, 0: 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000

Feb 14 11:55:40.890: vmx| hostCPUID level 80000006, 0: 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x01006040 0x00000000

Feb 14 11:55:40.890: vmx| hostCPUID level 80000007, 0: 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000100

Feb 14 11:55:40.891: vmx| hostCPUID level 80000008, 0: 0x00003028 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000

Feb 14 11:55:40.891: vmx| CPUID differences from hostCPUID.

Feb 14 11:55:40.891: vmx| CPUID[1] level 00000001, 0: 0x000206c2 0x21200800 0x009ee3fd 0xbfebfbff

Feb 14 11:55:40.892: vmx| CPUID[1] level 0000000b, 0: 0x00000001 0x00000002 0x00000100 0x00000021

Feb 14 11:55:40.892: vmx| CPUID[2] level 00000001, 0: 0x000206c2 0x22200800 0x009ee3fd 0xbfebfbff

Feb 14 11:55:40.892: vmx| CPUID[2] level 0000000b, 0: 0x00000001 0x00000002 0x00000100 0x00000022

Feb 14 11:55:40.892: vmx| CPUID[3] level 00000001, 0: 0x000206c2 0x23200800 0x009ee3fd 0xbfebfbff

Feb 14 11:55:40.893: vmx| CPUID[3] level 0000000b, 0: 0x00000001 0x00000002 0x00000100 0x00000023

Feb 14 11:55:40.893: vmx| CPUID[4] level 00000001, 0: 0x000206c2 0x32200800 0x009ee3fd 0xbfebfbff

Feb 14 11:55:40.893: vmx| CPUID[4] level 0000000b, 0: 0x00000001 0x00000002 0x00000100 0x00000032

Feb 14 11:55:40.894: vmx| CPUID[5] level 00000001, 0: 0x000206c2 0x33200800 0x009ee3fd 0xbfebfbff

Feb 14 11:55:40.894: vmx| CPUID[5] level 0000000b, 0: 0x00000001 0x00000002 0x00000100 0x00000033

Feb 14 11:55:40.894: vmx| CPUID[6] level 00000001, 0: 0x000206c2 0x34200800 0x009ee3fd 0xbfebfbff

Feb 14 11:55:40.895: vmx| CPUID[6] level 0000000b, 0: 0x00000001 0x00000002 0x00000100 0x00000034

Feb 14 11:55:40.895: vmx| CPUID[7] level 00000001, 0: 0x000206c2 0x35200800 0x009ee3fd 0xbfebfbff

Feb 14 11:55:40.895: vmx| CPUID[7] level 0000000b, 0: 0x00000001 0x00000002 0x00000100 0x00000035

Feb 14 11:55:40.895: vmx| CPUID Maximum Physical Address Bits supported across all CPUs: 40

Feb 14 11:55:40.896: vmx| Common: MSR  0x3a =                0x5

Feb 14 11:55:40.896: vmx| Common: MSR 0x480 =   0xda04000000000f

Feb 14 11:55:40.897: vmx| Common: MSR 0x481 =       0x7f00000016

Feb 14 11:55:40.897: vmx| Common: MSR 0x482 = 0xfff9fffe04006172

Feb 14 11:55:40.897: vmx| Common: MSR 0x483 =   0x7fffff00036dfb

Feb 14 11:55:40.898: vmx| Common: MSR 0x484 =     0xffff000011fb

Feb 14 11:55:40.898: vmx| Common: MSR 0x485 =            0x401e7

Feb 14 11:55:40.898: vmx| Common: MSR 0x486 =         0x80000021

Feb 14 11:55:40.899: vmx| Common: MSR 0x487 =         0xffffffff

Feb 14 11:55:40.899: vmx| Common: MSR 0x488 =             0x2000

Feb 14 11:55:40.899: vmx| Common: MSR 0x489 =            0x267ff

Feb 14 11:55:40.899: vmx| Common: MSR 0x48a =               0x2a

Feb 14 11:55:40.900: vmx| Common: MSR 0x48b =      0x4ff00000000

Feb 14 11:55:40.900: vmx| Common: MSR 0x48c =      0xf0106134141

Feb 14 11:55:40.900: vmx| Common: MSR 0x48d =       0x7f00000016

Feb 14 11:55:40.901: vmx| Common: MSR 0x48e = 0xfff9fffe04006172

Feb 14 11:55:40.901: vmx| Common: MSR 0x48f =   0x7fffff00036dfb

Feb 14 11:55:40.901: vmx| Common: MSR 0x490 =     0xffff000011fb

Feb 14 11:55:40.903: vmx| VMIOP: Init started

Feb 14 11:55:40.936: vmx| changing directory to /vmfs/volumes/4d24b9c3-9b2ab7c0-440f-842b2b06f421/web400-tst/.

Feb 14 11:55:40.937: vmx| Config file: /vmfs/volumes/4d24b9c3-9b2ab7c0-440f-842b2b06f421/web400-tst/web400.vmx

Feb 14 11:55:40.945: vmx| Vix: [106164 mainDispatch.c:3709]: VMAutomation_ReportPowerOpFinished: statevar=1, newAppState=1873, success=1 additionalE

rror=0

Feb 14 11:55:40.945: vmx| Vix: [106164 mainDispatch.c:3709]: VMAutomation_ReportPowerOpFinished: statevar=2, newAppState=1878, success=1 additionalError=0

Can i please get an explanantion on independent disks and raw drive mappings.

I want to know what are independent disks and whats the different between persistent and non-persistent and in which situation they are useful and not useful.

Also I want an understanding of the Raw disks , as well in what the advantages are, the types and when they would be useful as well.

I just want an understanding on these terms.

Thanks

Hello,

We have a testing server (proliant dl380g5) with esxi4.1 installed. one datastore on local SATA HDD constantly fails at random time, e.g. when doing storage vmotion to another datastore on another disk. the failed HDD blinks in orange, and no datastore is available through esxi console.

after hard reboot, I put failed hdd into another slot, boot up the server and datastore is accessible again, no data lost.

i can not find any notifications/logs about why does it fail, only that datastore is not accessible.

server's slots are ok, i'm already going through second circle through empty slots.

i think we should give this drive to the manufacturer (warrianty is valid), but have to provide some logs about failing disk, but can not find any.

your thoughts?

regards,

a.d.

I have several users, with permissions up to and including Administrator, who cannot use the search function in the vSphere client. When they attempt a search, the page sits there and never returns any results.

i was always able to search fine.

having now rebuilt my PC, i can no longer search either!

any idea on why? is there some client setting etc....

thanks

I have a ESX 4.1 Host in a 4 NIC physical server.

I use three nics of those four:

     vmnic0: I set at the installation time with the ip: 172.20.2.91

     vmnic1: NIC Teaming with vmnic0.

          Both of them configure for service console, vmkernel, and some VMs.

     vmnic3: set for FTP VM.

I have problem with the IP of vmnic1 and vmnic3, and I want to set them statically to know what of my IPs in my range used.

would u please show me how to set this?

Hi,

When we do a Hot vMotion, what exactly happens at the background. What files is created, what file is moved from where to where, what file is deleted if any applicable?

Thanks,

jK