I was just testing the new patches on a couple of servers when I noticed that when I pressed “remediate” the first patch(ESX350-200802403-BG) was installed without the ESX host going into maintenance mode. When the second patch(ESX350-200802409-BG) was installed the server went into maintenance mode. According to the VUM Documentation(vi3_vum_10_admin_guide.pdf) the server should always go [...]

read more....

Back in the days of ESX 2.5 I managed a bunch of IBM Servers. It regularly happened that when a raid mirror set broke the IBM ESX host(the only servers I witnessed this with…) froze completely. I thought this problem was fixed with 3.0.x and I thought it was a VMware problem.

read more....

During the installation of VirtualCenter the following error code was presented “25036″. With no further message the installation is cut-off. After a close inspection it seemed that there already were a couple of SQL Express 2005 services installed, the software was removed and the services were still there but disabled. I guess for some reason [...]

read more....

When troubleshooting a VMotion problem on an unpatched ESX 3.0.2 update 1 host today I wanted to use vmkping. This constantly resulted in the following error message:
syscall version mismatch (compiled: 0×7616c4e3, kernel: 0×50f63116)
I did not find any useful info on google so I checked the VMware knowledge base, maybe some over at VMware can read [...]

read more....

During the last couple of ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5 implementations I encountered some weird DRS/HA behavior:

During the reboot of a VM ESX decided to vmotion the VM, as you can imagine this took a lot longer than normal due to the memory being excessively active.
When the DRS Affinity Rules in a two cluster node [...]

read more....

VMware just announced VirtualCenter 2.0.2 update 3:
Resolved Issues include:
Virtual Machine Management Issues
PR:219126 - Virtual Machine Alarms Not Triggered This release fixes an issue where VirtualCenter alarms are not triggered when the alarm conditions are met.
PR:225357 - Host and Virtual Machine Alarms Stop Updating Over Time This release fixes an issue where some alarms that are [...]

read more....

Today I noticed the following in a ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5 environment: When you check the performance of the memory(past day) on the cluster the minimum and maximum is way more than expected. In this case the minimum is 66,9% and the maximum 106,01%. This cluster has around 64GB of memory and there’s [...]

read more....