Does anybody know what kind of criteria VMWare uses to determine which motherboards will and will not be supported with future updates?

Background: Trying to build a whitebox ESX4.0i server for home use.  My vendor sent me a new S3420GP board (brand new model) with an Intel 3420 chipset. Nice board. It supports up to 32 GB of expensive RAM or 16 GB cheap RAM, but it doesn't work. Just hangs at "Initializing scheduler". 

My options are, I can sent the motherboard back and buy a "certified" board like the S3200 or S3210 board (but these can only handle up to 8 GB RAM) or "hope" that a ESX4.02 or future build will handle this (and try out Xenserver until then

Got below error while trying to combine snapshot files.

vmkfstools -i AXTST167-000001.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/axtstbundled/AXTST167.vmdk

Destination disk format: VMFS zeroedthick

Failed to open 'AXTST167-000001.vmdk': Invalid argument (1441801).

Hi All.

   I am trying to install esxi 4.1. I keep freezing at the "Loading module usb".  I have an asus M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 motherboard, w/ 8 gig of Gskill DDR3 Ram.. i also have an AMD 1055T processor. I have researched as much as i could and thought I had all the issues identified for the install.

I have disabled 4 of the 6 cores, turned off USB 3.0, then turned off all on the board services, IE: esata, sound, NIC. etc etc

None of this has worked. I have read quite a few times where people have had these chipsets working IE: 890GTD and SB850

I also have a Raid 1 set up with my VelociRaptors. I am not quite sure what is going on. I work on ESX all the time, and I have not enountered an issue I was not able to over come.

Anyone have some suggestoins?

Scott

Hi,

My System specs are as follows:

CPUs: 2x Intel Xeon E5620

Motherboard: Intel S5520HC
Ram: 12x Kingston KVR1066D3D4R7S/4GI for a total of 48GB
USB: 4GB Kingston DataTraveler for booting ESXi 4.1
RAID Controller: Adaptec 6405 (firmware build 18301) with AFM-600 NAND FLASH MEMORY BACKUP for 6 SERIES
HDD: 4x Seagate Constellation ES SAS 1TB ST31000424SS (firmware 0006)

After suffering poor write performance the first time I went ahead and produced a fresh install of ESXi 4.1 Update 1 installed to the usb stick listed above.

I then installed the VMware ESX/ESXi 4.1 Driver CD for PMC Sierra aacraid from http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/dt_esx41_pmc_aacraid_11728000/ZCV0YnR0aipiZColcA==

After installing and restarting ESXi I could then see the raid array and create a datastore.

Currently the raid is configured as a RAID 10 I have tried RAID 6 with the same poor write performance. Write Cache is forced on and ZMM is at optimal charge!

I have been testing performance with Crystal Disk Mark running in a Windows 2008 R2 x64 VM.

Sequential Read is 286MB/s and Sequential Write is 28MB/s.

On another system which is an i7 950 with Adaptec 5805 with BBU running ESXi 4.1 with the same hard drives but configured in a RAID6.

Sequential Read is 246MB/s and Sequential Write is 207MB/s.

I would like to get the 6405 writing atleast 5x faster than its currently operating instead of sending it off as ewaste!

Thank you in advance for any assistance you can offer me.

Update: Tried Paravirtual SCSI Controller and a vdisk on the Windows vm for a bit of fun. The test results are 325MB/s Sequential Read and 28MB/s Sequential Write.

Hello,

Although I have used VMWare Workstation in the past, I am new to VMWare ESXi, so please bear with me on this.  I will try to be as detailed as possible.  I recently purchased components to a server that I would like to try installing ESXi on as a test bed before rolling it out to other hardware.  Unfortunately, things are not going as I would have hoped, ESXi 3.5 is not installing.  The message I am getting is not terribly helpful either - something along the lines of required hardware not being detected.  But let's start at the beginning, with the hardware:

- Motherboard: Supermicro X8DTi

- Processors: 2x Intel Xeon E5520

- Memory: 6x 2GB Crucial DDR3-1333 ECC Unbuffered SDRAM

- Hard Drive: 1x SATA Hard drive (Western Digital branded, 640GB - Caviar Black series)

- Optical Drive: 1x SATA Optical Drive (LG branded)

- USB Mouse/USB Keyboard/LCD monitor plugged in to VGA-OUT on motherboard

Basically, my procedure was:

1. Connect all hardware, make sure it passes POST and verify everything is seen in BIOS

2. Put DVD containing an image of VMWare ESXi 3.5 in to DVD drive and watch it load, then fail to install.

Interestingly, the failure message states I should write down hardware information before asking for help, but it doesn't seem like something worth posting here... it incorrectly detected my motherboard, and also generated a serial number of something like "1234567890".  I thought posting the actual hardware in the box might help more.

Any assistance you could give would be greatly appreciated.

Hi guys,

We are currently looking at vmware as our solution to a cloud based infrastructure, running a VoIP Service. We are a small VoIP provider, with an average of 75,000 minutes per month.

My Current Shopping List for Hardware

Dell PowerEdge R210 Servers X 3 (Giving 3 potential hardware nodes)

Dell PowerConnect 2816 x 2 (Cross connects between nodes etc)

Iomega ix4-200d Cloud Edition (iSCSI Interface for Data storage layer)

I am just a little confused as per what vmware software implemenation to use. The online advisor suggested vSphere 4, however I see that this has some limitations, such as 256MB ram per hardware node.

Each of our servers has 4GB of Ram and two NIC cards.

We wanted to have a completely fault taulerant VoIP service (based upon Asterisk). As such, if one hardware node goes down, there should not be any interruption in service. Likewise, if we add more hardware it should pool from those resources.

Our cost for the implementation is starting to rack up quickly, so we are a little confused as to what license we would need, and or software.

I see that ESXI is free, but vSphere 4 is a paid product. Can anybody recommend a software solution for just 3 servers?

Thanks in advance,

Chase.

Hi,

We have an IBM Blade Chassis with 2 integrated BNT Layer 2/3 Copper Gigabit Ethernet Switch Modules. Latest firmware applied. Each integrated switch is connected to one upstream switch using one cable. 3 VLANs are trunked down to Blade Chassis through each link. Blade servers are running ESXi 4.1. vSwitch0 has Management network and 3 VM port groups connected to their target VLANs. The vSwitch0 is connected to vmnic0 and vmnic1. I can remove and add vmnic0 and vmnic1 from vSwitch0 and it all works fine, traffic fails over seamlessly as it should.

Now, the problem: Integrated switches have 6 external and 14 internal ports (one per blade). Loss of link on external port (cable unplugged, upstream switch dead etc.) will not result in link down state on internal port. In turn, ESXi running on blade still shows vmnic0 and vmnic1 as up and running and will not detect failure of upstream link and will not fail over the traffic.

I know there is a way to configure integrated switch to disable internal ports in case of external port link down situation, which would correctly inform ESXi that vmnicx is down and allow it to fail traffic to the other vmnic. I can't figure out where this setting is. I looked through available documentation and can't find anything.

The situation I have and mechanism for failover / informing internal ports in case of external port failure is nicely diagramed here, Figure 16-1. The only difference is that we have only one cable going from integrated switch to upstream switch, the rest is the same:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus4000/nexus4000_i/sw/configuration/guide/rel_4_1_2_E1_1/link_state_track.pdf

I know ESXi failover can be configured for Beacon Probing, but I'd much rather have internal port on the switch fail when external uplink fails, because I know this failover will work 100% reliably.

I'd appreciate if someone has the same config and can post what needs to be enabled for this to work.

Thanks

I have one customer with standalone ESXi. Local Adaptec RAID, several LUNs on top of it, each with VMFS.

For some reasons ESXi hanged up. They rebooted ESXi and then strange thing happened.

One VMFS datastore just didn't come up.

What I've found in logs:

Aug 13 13:05:54 vmkernel: 0:00:00:39.189 cpu5:4101)NMP: nmp_CompleteCommandForPath: Command 0x28 (0x41000503c3c0) to NMP device "mpx.vmhba2:C0:T3:L0" failed on physical path "vmhba2:C0:T3:L0" H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x4 0x44 0x0.

Aug 13 13:05:54 vmkernel: 0:00:00:39.189 cpu5:4101)ScsiDeviceIO: 747: Command 0x28 to device "mpx.vmhba2:C0:T3:L0" failed H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x4 0x44 0x0.

Aug 13 13:05:54 vmkernel: 0:00:00:39.189 cpu5:4101)ScsiDeviceToken: 293: Sync IO 0x28 to device "mpx.vmhba2:C0:T3:L0" failed: I/O error H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x4 0x44 0x0.

Aug 13 13:05:54 vmkernel: 0:00:00:39.189 cpu7:4973)WARNING: FS3: 4053: Read error: I/O error

Aug 13 13:05:54 vmkernel: 0:00:00:39.190 cpu7:4973)WARNING: FS3: 4820: Failed to initialize VMFS3 distributed locking on volume 4bb3ae52-50496cd0-bb39-003048c6e051: I/O error

Aug 13 13:05:54 vmkernel: 0:00:00:39.190 cpu7:4973)FSS: 666: Failed to get object f530 28 1 4bb3ae52 50496cd0 3000bb39 51e0c648 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 :I/O error

Aug 13 13:05:54 vmkernel: 0:00:00:39.190 cpu7:4973)OC: 941: Could not get object from FS driver: I/O error

Aug 13 13:05:54 vmkernel: 0:00:00:39.190 cpu7:4973)WARNING: Fil3: 1930: Failed to reserve volume f530 28 1 4bb3ae52 50496cd0 3000bb39 51e0c648 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Aug 13 13:05:54 vmkernel: 0:00:00:39.190 cpu7:4973)FSS: 666: Failed to get object f530 28 2 4bb3ae52 50496cd0 3000bb39 51e0c648 4 1 0 0 0 0 0 :I/O error

Aug 13 13:05:54 vmkernel: 0:00:00:39.190 cpu7:4973)WARNING: FSS: 2946: Unable to reserve symlink f530 28 2 4bb3ae52 50496cd0 3000bb39 51e0c648 4 1 0 0 0 0 0 in OC

Aug 13 13:05:54 vmkernel: 0:00:00:39.247 cpu5:4101)NMP: nmp_CompleteCommandForPath: Command 0x28 (0x4100050794c0) to NMP device "mpx.vmhba2:C0:T3:L0" failed on physical path "vmhba2:C0:T3:L0" H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x4 0x44 0x0.

Aug 13 13:05:54 vmkernel: 0:00:00:39.247 cpu5:4101)ScsiDeviceIO: 747: Command 0x28 to device "mpx.vmhba2:C0:T3:L0" failed H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x4 0x44 0x0.

Aug 13 13:05:54 vmkernel: 0:00:00:39.247 cpu5:4101)ScsiDeviceToken: 293: Sync IO 0x28 to device "mpx.vmhba2:C0:T3:L0" failed: I/O error H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x4 0x44 0x0.

I've checked VMFS signature placement, all is ok. And you can see that from UUID resolving for this volume.

I saw another customer with absolutely the same problem, but it happened on EMC SAN, so we just made snapshot and recovered VMs from there. Here is local RAID and no way to use the same solution.

Any thoughts?

---

MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert

http://blog.vadmin.ru

Hi,

ESXi hosts are accessible via SSH and VMs are also working. But ESXi hosts are disconnected in vCenter.

@ hostd.log:

[2011-02-07 16:56:03.950 FFFD1E90 info 'Vimsvc'] [Auth]: User root                                                                                              

[2011-02-07 16:56:03.950 FFFD1E90 info 'ha-eventmgr'] Event 3 : User root@127.0.0.1 logged in                                                                   

[2011-02-07 16:56:05.457 3EFD5B90 verbose 'Proxysvc Req00006'] New proxy client TCP(local=127.0.0.1:60989, peer=127.0.0.1:80)                                                          

[2011-02-07 16:56:05.674 3EE40B90 verbose 'Ticket 52 e3 1b 60 89 8e 5a 96-b4 29 d7 9f 2f bb 8a c7'] Ticket invalidated                                                                                   

[2011-02-07 16:56:05.951 3EE40B90 verbose 'Proxysvc Req00007'] New proxy client SSL(TCP(local=127.0.0.1:57144, peer=127.0.0.1:0))                                                                    

[2011-02-07 16:56:05.951 3ECF7B90 warning 'Proxysvc Req00007'] Error reading from client while waiting for header: N7Vmacore15SystemExceptionE(Connection reset by peer)         

[2011-02-07 16:56:06.151 3ECF7B90 verbose 'Proxysvc Req00008'] New proxy client SSL(TCP(local=127.0.0.1:52388, peer=127.0.0.1:443))                

.............

............

[2011-02-07 17:11:09.718 3EE40B90 error 'App'] Failed to read header on stream TCP(local=127.0.0.1:59909, peer=127.0.0.1:0): N7Vmacore15SystemExceptionE(Connection reset by peer)                     

[2011-02-07 17:11:13.788 3F540B90 verbose 'Cimsvc'] Ticket issued for CIMOM version 1.0, user root                                                                                                      

[2011-02-07 17:11:20.014 3EE81B90 verbose 'Statssvc'] HostCtl exception Unable to complete Sysinfo operation.  Please see the VMkernel log file for more details.   

......

[2011-02-07 17:16:10.339 3ECF7B90 error 'App'] Failed to read header on stream TCP(local=127.0.0.1:57997, peer=127.0.0.1:0): N7Vmacore15SystemExceptionE(Connection reset by peer)

[2011-02-07 17:16:20.014 3EE81B90 verbose 'Statssvc'] HostCtl exception Unable to complete Sysinfo operation.  Please see the VMkernel log file for more details.

......

[2011-02-07 17:21:10.949 FFFD1E90 error 'App'] Failed to read header on stream TCP(local=127.0.0.1:63284, peer=127.0.0.1:0): N7Vmacore15SystemExceptionE(Connection reset by peer)

[2011-02-07 17:21:20.014 3ECF7B90 verbose 'Statssvc'] HostCtl exception Unable to complete Sysinfo operation.  Please see the VMkernel log file for more details.            

@ vpxa.log:

[2011-02-07 16:56:11.187 FFD2BB10 info 'SoapAdapter.HTTPService'] Http Service started: TCPServerSocket(ASYNC_ACCEPT, ipv4=TCP(fd=97 name=127.0.0.1:8090), ipv6=TCP(null))

@ End of logs

Restarted management network and agent on one of ESXi, didn't resolve the issue.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

William

Hi,

I can't find ESXi 4.1 U3 iso image anymore.

Could someone please point me a right direction to download it?

Thanks!

Petteri

We have had some discussions concerning the performance impact of installing vmware tools on a vm.

Are their any comparison's between a system running vanilla versus one running with the vmware tools installed?

Obviously I think the system will run faster with the vmware drivers installed.

Is there a way to save vCenter Map directly into Visio? I'm trying to make visio diagram for our VMware enviroment.  any suggestions would be appreiciated.thanks.

I was browsing our datastore this morning and noticed that some of the VMs have multiple VMDK files. They're labled as Servername.vmdk, Servername_1.vmdk, etc. We had played around with VM Data Recovery in the past but no longer use it and I'm wondering if that's what these are from. Is there a way to know if any of these files are ok to delete? Some of them are taking up a lot of space.

Is it possible to set up a remote restart of a Virtual Machine via a web? Recently I was asked to help with IT support for a business that uses ESXi v4.1 to run two windows 2008 OSs. I discovered that employees tend to hard restart the ESXi server each time something goes wrong. One of their virtual machines running Windows Server 2008 does crash time to time and requires a reboot. I'd like to set up a mechanism that will allows employes to restart the guest virtual machine without restarting ESXi server. Is it possible?

I'll do my best to describe the problem and hopefully someone can explain to me what I'm doing wrong. The host only has 1 VM running on it.

Host consists of 3 datastores.

Datastore1 465.66 GB - local - vmfs 3.33 - Max File size 256 GB - Block size 1 MB

Datastore2 931.25 GB - local - vmfs 3.33 - Max File size 256 GB - Block size 1 MB

Datastore3 1.86 TB - iscsi - vmfs 3.54 - Max File size 2048 GB - Block Size 8 MB

Guest Configuration

Hard disk 1 32GB Thick on datastore1

Hard disk 2 100GB thick on datastore2

Hard disk 3 256GB thin on datastore2

Hard disk 4 250GB thick on datastore 3

So the original problem we had was creating a backup with Veeam. I don't recall the original error, but I looked it up and discovered that it was due to trying to create a snapshot of hard disk 3 on a datastore with a 1MB block size. The file plus the snapshot overhead was too large for the datastore max file size.

I shut the VM down and added workingDir = "/vmfs/volumes/4f5eedb2-3b4780ce-93b6-001a4bbe3fe0/vm-snapshots" which moved the snapshot directory to datastore 3.

I am still not able to get a Veeam backup. I contacted Veeam support and after looking at the job logs they told me it was an ESXi problem because datastore2 Hard disk 2 is not available when trying to create snapshots.

Getting downtime on this system is pretty rare, and when I do get it, it's not for very long. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I'll be happy to provide vmware and veeam logs if someone thinks that will help.

Every time I reboot a host, it gets stuck on "iscsi_vmk loaded successfully" for about 10-15 minutes. The first couple of times, I've gotten impatient and powered off the host and rebooted thinking it's locked up. One time I let it go and it successfully completed the boot process. Now I'm thinking this is normal and the host's vmware iSCSI software initiator must be rescanning all my iSCSI datastores. Can anyone confirm this is what's taking place or do I have a potential problem here?

I know there's different advice and methods for growing disks.

I'm looking for specific advice on growing the C: system drive of a Windows 2003 SP2 server guest VM.

It's on an ESXi 4.1 U2 host.

Thank you, Tom

Logging of "Power-on Reset occurred on naa...." in vmkernel happened without fail on a VMware ESXi 4.1.0 build-502767 host upon the restart of the Windows 2008 guest VM, which is also the ONLY guest VM on this host. This event also happened to the restart of a Redhat 5 VM on another host, although details on the involved host are not avail at this stage.

Both ESX host and guest VM seem to be running fine after VM restart.

Around this restart period was also present a number of logging of this nature H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x6 0x29 0x0, after which Storage Support staff examined the storage and said nothing was untowards in the underlying storage

Restarting the guest Windows Vm with Diagnostic Startup i.e. just loading essential Windows devices and services only also generated the same event.

Thanks for any suggestion,

Hong

Would like to understand if ESX is a type-2 hypervisor or type-1 ? I am new to Virtualization.

Hello!

I have free version of ESXi 4.0 installed on my server Supermicro

This server not have any interfaces to monotoring system state (ex. ILO iface)

This server have only COM and ethernet ports.

How i can monitoring any server healths (temperature HDD,CPU,RAID, CPU fan speed etc) ?