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Testing VM Monitoring on vSphere 5.0

Duncan Epping · Jul 20, 2011 ·

I was testing VM Monitoring and needed to trigger a Blue Screen of Death. Unfortunately the “CrashOnCtrlScroll” solution did not work so I needed a different solution. I finally managed to get it sorted by doing the following:

Add the following key to your registry by doing a copy and paste of the following line, note that I had to break up the line to make it viewable on my blog unfortunately:

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl"
/v NMICrashDump /t REG_DWORD /d 0x1 /f

List all VMs running on the host to get the World ID of the VM, SSH into your ESXi 5.0 host and type the following:

esxcli vm process list

Write down or copy the world ID of the VM and send an NMI request to trigger the BSOD, replace “<world id>” with the appropriate ID:

vmdumper <world id vm> nmi

This results in a nice BSOD and followed by a reboot by VM Monitoring including a screenshot of the VMs console (see screenshot below) before the reboot.

Related

Server 5.0, ha, vm monitoring, vSphere

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Comments

  1. Cwjking says

    20 July, 2011 at 15:38

    Yeah sometimes the crtl scrlk method needs to have a registry set. We would just kill csrss.exe and that causes an immediate blue screen if all else fails…

    And we would do that if we were testing stuff.

    I used to dump VM’s when they became unresponvice on a host. This is good to know.

  2. jfk8680 says

    20 July, 2011 at 15:50

    NotMyFault.exe from Sysinternals can also generate a BSOD…

    http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/Notmyfault.zip

  3. Troy Clavell says

    20 July, 2011 at 16:09

    It’s also outlined in http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1009187 just in case 🙂

  4. Fred Peterson says

    20 July, 2011 at 17:21

    Is there a way to control the VM Monitoring so if a server ends up in a loop of BSOD’s it stops rebooting it? Not that its a huge deal it does it, but it does seem pointless to take up resources of the boot process (CPU, disk) when its not effective.

    • Duncan Epping says

      20 July, 2011 at 22:44

      yes there is an advanced setting called das.maxfailures which controls this, I believe the default is 3 retries.

      • Rickard Nobel says

        21 July, 2011 at 00:01

        That is the same as in the GUI for vSphere 4.x? Where you could set a maximum number of resets per hour?

  5. Doug says

    21 July, 2011 at 04:13

    Funny times when you need to document how to create a BSOD in Windows… I remember the days when all we had to do was use it for a few minutes to get that to happen. 😉

  6. Karuna says

    14 February, 2012 at 12:41

    I need to test VM monitoring on CentOS ..any idea how to trigger a failure and recovery for the VM so that I could monitor for HB failure and check for HA?

  7. Duncan says

    14 February, 2012 at 17:07

    Sorry, don’t know…

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007), the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive", the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series, and the host of the "Unexplored Territory" podcast.

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