Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

Upgrade to 3.5/2.5 update 1

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Just upgraded a production environment to 3.5 update 1 and 2.5 update 1. Everything went surprisingly smooth. Looking at the Update Manager I noticed the total amount of 40 patches at this moment for 3.5. If you have a closer look you will notice that a lot of those are related to specific hardware or packages. I heard a couple of rumors that the Update Manager will do “selective” updates in the future depending on the hardware that the system holds. About the packages, I guess that will be history when ESXi is the only Hypervisor around….

Anyway, the upgrade went smoothly.

Swapping and/or ballooning

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Today a customer called about a problem with the Exchange VM. For some reason the ESX Host where this VM resided was always swapping/ballooning. They checked and double checked the settings but could not find the problem. After a quick scan I noticed that there were limits set on memory for each VM. This particular VM had 1536MB of memory and a limit of 1024MB. After changing the setting back to it’s default setting, “unlimited”, the message was gone. I haven’t got a clue why this setup this way, limitting the memory to the exact amount assigned to a VM… weird, but problem solved.

Patches for 3.0.1 and 3.0.2…

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I just received the following:

New patches are available for ESX Server 3.0.1 and ESX Server 3.0.2.

ESX Server patches can be accessed through the on-line ESX Server Patch Download tool:
[http://app.connect.vmware.com/e/er.aspx?s=524&lid=2272&elq=4D5713F997F04342981A231DF09609D0“>]

Please follow the instructions on the appropriate patch download page.

VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 Patches

ESX-1003516 (Critical): fixes an issue where snapshot of a Suspended Virtual Machine fails;includes a fix for Windows OEM CDs Installation Failure; fixes an issue where Virtual Machines stop responding When Updated with Symantec Virus Definition
ESX-1003517 (Security):updates the e2fsprogs package
ESX-1003518 (Critical):changes the default Multipath Policy;fixes an issue where ESX Server stops responding due to low COW Heap Memory;fixes an issue where ESX Server hosts stop responding due to a spinlock timeout;includes fixes for SysAlert Warning Message, Partially Disabled Processors
ESX-1003520 (General):fixes an issue with the USB Subsystem and High-Speed USB HID Devices
ESX-1003521 (Security):Updates the libxml2 Utility

VMware ESX Server 3.0.2 Patches

ESX-1003523 (Security):updates the e2fsprogs package
ESX-1003524 (Critical):updates VMware-esx-vmkernel, VMware-esx-vmx, and VMware-esx-apps
ESX-1003526 (General):fixes an issue with USB Subsystem and High-Speed USB HID
ESX-1003527 (General):adds support for Ubuntu 7.10 GA
ESX-1003528 (Security):updates the libxml2 Utility

We expect the next patch release in late April 2008. If you have any questions, please contact support at 877-4-VMWARE.

Performance stats gone

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Clint discovered the following:

Source –
Ran into a problem while doing some performance testing on some test VMs. We found that we had no historical performance data for the VM or Host. All we had was real time data. This can be a major issue, especially when you are trying to troubleshoot or like in this case get performance data for a performance test! My co-worker did some research and found that we are not an isolated event. This is a bug in VC 2.5.

The Fix

We found a few references to doing a “repair” install of VC 2.5. So we went ahead and tried it and it worked. We also found references to the performance data getting corrupted. In that case they had to restore the database to a prior dataset and re-install the VC.

I’ve seen the same at several customer sites and indeed the fix that Clint describes, repair of VirtualCenter, works.