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…] about Broken Mirror freezes ESX host
New patches for 3.0.x
There are a bunch of new patches released for 3.0.x:
New patches are available for ESX Server 3.0.1 and ESX Server 3.0.2. Please follow the instructions on the appropriate patch download page.
VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 Patch Download Page
[http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches_301.html] ESX-1003504 (General): Fix for mptscsi_2xx Driver
ESX-1003505 (General): Fixes Network Connectivity Issues with Intel e1000 Driver
ESX-1003506 (General): Virtual Machines Boot Failure Through Network for PXE Clients
ESX-1003507 (Critical): Fixes Packet Latency and tg3 Driver Issues
ESX-1003355 (General): I/O Transactions on SUN X4200 Servers Cause SCSI Timeouts
ESX-1003508 (General): Fixes for VirtualCenter Server Agent Crash, Hot Addition and Deletion of LUNs Failure, Deletion of Virtual Machine Level Permissions; Support for VirtualCenter 2.0.x to Read Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 License Files
ESX-1003509 (General): Fixes for RARP Broadcast With NICs Failover and Hot Addition / Deletion of LUNs FailureVMware ESX Server 3.0.2 Patch Download Page
[http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches_302.html] ESX-1003513 (General): Fixes for Vmotion and Clone Operations Failure, VirtualCenter Server Agent Crash, Hot Addition and Deletion of LUNs Failure, Virtual Machine Level Permissions; VirtualCenter 2.0.x Failure to Read VI 3.5 License Files
ESX-1003177 (General): I/O Transactions on SUN X4200 Servers Cause SCSI Timeouts
ESX-1003514 (Critical): Fixes Packet Latency and tg3 Driver Issues
ESX-1003515 (Critical): Support for VMotion Incompatibility, Network Connectivity Issues; Fixes for Hot Addition and Deletion of LUNs Failure, Virtual Machines Boot Failure Through Network for PXE Clients, RARP Broadcast With NICs FailoverWe expect the next patch release in late March 2008. If you have any questions, please contact support at 877-4-VMWARE.
Tools Tools Tools
For anyone using the good old Winscp client, it was just updated to 4.0.7. Same goes for mRemote, it has just been updated to version 1.35. Pick it up, and while your at it visit VM4All. Eric keeps track of all VMware related tools!
Fiber channel round-robin load balancing
There’s a nice article about “round-robin” load balancing on SystemsArchitech which got me a bit dazzled about this new functionality:
esxcfg-mpath – lun <*.lun> —policy custom –H minq –T any –C 0 –B 2048
The policy states that the LUN should utilize a custom policy that determines which (of two) HBA to utilize based on the minimum queue length. This HBA selection is triggered every 2048 blocks transmitted to a given LUN over the same target. The policy will use any targets available to either of the two HBAs. In using storage that manages host port load-balancing, LUNs will only have two paths (one per fabric) and the storage array will perform storage array host port balancing from within its own management. With other storage arrays it is typical to perform this host port balancing from the hosts accessing the given storage array.
With 10 ESX hosts set with this policy wouldn’t it probably cause path thrashing on an active/active SAN? You never know which controller will access a specific LUN and if your unlucky it will be switching from controller A to controller B every millisecond. Anyone else any thoughts on this new feature and the possible danger?
Error code 25036 during VirtualCenter installation
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 the removal of SQL 2005 Express wasn’t successful. The installation procedure seems to have a hard time overwriting the registry values or changing the old values. This problem can easily be solved by manually deleting that specific service in the registry. (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services)