WindowsAdminGuru BLOG

How to deal with PSOD - VMware PSOD Purple Screen of Death - Debugger waiting (world 2078) -- no port for remote debugger. "Escape" for local debugger - Easy troubleshooting steps and how to identify or determine exact root cause of the PSOD issue Host is down with PSOD with the above said error. Verified BIOS settings, worked with on site engineer, contacted the IBM server support (since this is IBM server, have contacted IBM, if it is IBM or some other hardware, you may need to reach out the respective vendor) Sometimes it could be server hardware issue like DIMMs, CPU, Processor related or may be a chance of network related. Please have a through check on the above said and come to a conclusion what could the issue. Based on that, need to troubleshoot the issue.

Guest OS VM sessions going into hung state or unresponsive state while taking snapshot backups. The reason being, while taking snapshot backups, if any more activities planned like running some batch scripts that might cause CPU spike. This leads to more load on the VM session, the assigned resources are not available or in some cases, the data store got filled out fast. In this scenario, we will have stop the VM snapshot backup and reboot the server and check the logs what is the reason the server went into hung state. If the same issue getting repeated, VMware admins can do is, when you found the VM session in unresponsive state, move the VM into suspend mode and download the logs. Later can do the investigation if needed.

VMware System Admins must know this information where the VMware Site Recovery Manager service name will be available in case, if admin unable to connect to SRM configuration server via vCenters. Usually SRM server will be different than the vCenter server. What is the VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) service and where we can find this? This can be found in Services Login to SRM server and go to Services and search for VMware VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Server

Why this error occurs and the symptoms: Downloading a file to local machine with the vCenter clients datastore browser fails with the error: Failed to log into NFC server Connecting vCenter client directly to ESX hosts works without error. ESX host /etc/ vmware /config files  contain the lines: authd.soapServer = "TRUE" prefvmx.consolidateDeleteNFSLocks = "TRUE"authd.proxy.vpxa-nfc = "vmware-vpxa:vpxa-nfc" authd.proxy.vpxa-nfcssl = "vmware-vpxa:vpxa-nfcssl" Solution for this issue or error: This issue occurs when a carriage return is missing from /etc/vmware/config. To resolve this issue, go to edit /etc/vmware/config: 1. Make a backup of this file from the path - /etc/vmware/config, by executing the below command: cp /etc/vmware/config /var/tmp/ 2. Edit /etc/vmware/config so that there is a carriage return after the line: prefvmx.consolidateDeleteNFSLocks = "TRUE" so that it reads the below: authd.soapServer = "TRUE"...

I know every ESX admin has dealt with storage performance issues at some point. Most detailed research includes modifying the HBA queue depth. Basically queue depth is the number of outstanding requests between the HBA and storage. I believe the default is 32. This is normally fine, but with VMware you are sharing the HBA so if you have a multitude of high i/o servers, you may have more than 32 requests. When the queue length is reached there is basically a SCSI reset and communications is briefly halted. This can cause performance issues if it happens often. You can use ESXTOP in disk mode to see your queues. If you decide to change them you can use esxcfg-module as per below (from http://communities.vmware.com/message/790859#790859 ): Set the HBA queue length to 64 on all adapters to get driver: vmkload_mod -l | grep qla for q logic vmkload_mod -l | grep lpfcdd for exmulex to change q logic esxcfg-module -s "ql2xmaxqdepth=nn" esxcfg-boot -b or esxcfg-boot...

To use a syslog server with your ESX environment: In /etc/syslog.conf file add the line "*.* @IP Address” service syslog restart "esxcfg-firewall -o 514,udp,out,syslog" to allow syslog outgoing trafic "esxcfg-firewall -l" to load config

I have been curious to test out round robin load balancing in ESX 3.5. Recently I have been only working with Clariion (active/passive) arrays. Now at my new client they have active/active arrays (Symmetrix). From my understanding the way it works is it will push I/O on an HBA path until a set amount of blocks are sent. At that point it looks to see which HBA has a smaller queue and it will use that path until the number of blocks is reached again. You dont have to set it like this. You can have it use a preferred path, etc., but this option seems to make the most sense. I dont know if this is how it really works, but that is my understanding. Pretty cool stuff if it works. As to this day it still says experimental. Anyone use this?

Here is how to install the navisphere agent on esx Log into ESX server via ILO VI /etc/ssh/sshd_config Change permit root login = yes to uncommented comment out permit root login=no run service sshd restart Use winscp to connect to the server via ssh Copy the navisphere files to /home Log into the ESX server via ssh See if the agent is already installed by running rpm -qi naviagent rpm -ivh naviagent-.rpm add user system@(IP address of SPA) to the agent.config file in /etc/navisphere/agent.config using vi add user system@(IP address of SPB) to the agent.config file in /etc/navisphere/agent.config using vi You can also do the above steps using the navicli by typing: navicli remoteconfig -setconfig -adduser system@SPA IP (Do the same for SPB) run service naviagent start from the command line Open up firewall ports by typing the below commands [root@server home]# esxcfg-firewall -o 6390,tcp,in,naviagent [root@server home]# esxcfg-firewall -o 6391,tcp,in,nav...

It looks like Dell/Equallogic won the mid-size storage array of the year. I am currently working with a customer to get rid of one. My guess on why it has such a large install base in this industry is the fact that it is the standard of one of the large IT support firms that do support in my industry. It does work. It can be fairly slow and uses RAID-50. Yes, RAID-50. Each unit itself can only have 14 disks and dual controllers. It is pure iSCSI. If you want to add disk, you add a unit and create a group. The group is basically a multitude of units in which a pool of storage is created. Hosts connect to the group IP and that forwards you to the correct unit to get your data. It is basically the same thing the big guys are trying to do with storage virtualization. EMC and Netapp have been doing similar stuff on a larger scale. The idea is cool. You pop one of these and add it to the group and it auto-configures its RAID groups, IP info, disks, access, etc. Pretty neat. It is a slo...

vmkfstools –i /vmfs/volumes/data1/W2K3standardgoldenmaster/W2K3standardgoldenmaster.vmdk -d rdm:/vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba1:0:6:0 /vmfs/volumes/data1/rdmvir/rdmvir.vmdk Convert VMFS VMDK to RDM

I use this document so much that I figured I would post a link to it. I always seem to have issues with my ESX servers losing their time sync via NTP. Here is how to set it up correctly (it will still break) and how to fix it. http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1339

If you try to use vmconverter to import a VM from another virtual center you probably have seen the "unable to determine guest operating system" error. There is an easy workaround. Change the OS on the VM that you are going to import to Windows 2008 64 BIT. Run the import. Then change it back after the import.

If you are getting insufficient resources to satisfy HA failover messages, check this article out on why and how to fix it. The way they calculate resources is kind of wack. http://www.vmwarewolf.com/ha-failover-capacity/

Try this Solution : Right-click the vSphere Client’s shortcut and choose Properties. In the Compatibility tab select Disable desktop composition

When configuring the array manager for SRM with Netapp NFS volumes you receive the following error: Error while executing 'discoverLuns' command If you are only using NFS with VMware you will need to create a dummy igroup for VMware - igroup create -i -t vmware sra_dummy_igroup