Yesterday evening I witnessed a weird phenomenon. We had to bring down a complete environment to move a 19″ rack to a different location. We switched the SAN on, waited a couple of minutes and switched the ESX hosts on. When the ESX hosts finished booting we booted the VirtualCenter. Everything looked normal in the VI Client. I had all connections to the SAN and all ESX Hosts were up and running. So I decided to power up the first VM, it was a VM named LNX01. Within a second the VM got renamed to LNX05(1). I though I was going nuts. I checked the settings of the renamed VM and indeed it was pointing out to the LNX05 diskfiles/vmx.
Maybe it was just me, or this one VM so I decided to give another one a try, I powered up LNX02. Same happening here, within a second the VM was renamed to PS01(1) and booted fine. The settings were pointing out to PS01. I checked a couple of VM’s but could not find anything weird. I restarted the VirtualCenter service just to be sure. I started the VM LNX03 and again it was renamed… Than I decided to restart the “mgmt-vmware” services on all of the ESX hosts and the problem never returned again. It seems like VirtualCenter had a different view than the ESX hosts had. But I can’t think of a logical reason what could cause this. I searched the knowledge base but could not find any related problems, well besides an old article based on VirtualCenter 1.2.
Not surprising coming from a WIndows managed system as VC seems to always have an inaccurate state of the host and its inventory whenever things change than what it is reported from the host directly. Again this is indicative of a poor management infrastructure so if they ever get off of their tuffs and release a Linux VC than will all be better off!!
A bonafide Windoze hater!!
LMAO like the underlying OS has anything to do with the code written on top seeing the correct VM’s on an ESX host. Mr. Reed, the problem isn’t the OS it is the poor implementation of a management console.
Although I must admit I’d rather see a Linux based VC, I don’t think Windows is the one causing this problem. It seemed like the database was just causing all this trouble, it wasn’t in line with the esx hosts.
Hi,
Maybe nothing related, but do you have the EnableResignature setting on ?
We had a strange case while testing with san disk re-presentation wuth this setting on.
I don’t think it is the same case, but check in this ESX advanced configs (LVM).
Cheers