I have a small lab environment setup that I have 5 guest OSes setup on a single ESXi 4 update 1 server. The server is a a base Dell T110, no raid, single sata drive. The Dell T110 has 8 GB of ram and plenty of disk space. The CPU is a quad core processor model X3430, 2.4/4.8, 8MB, Xeon Unitary Lynnfield, B1. I installed the dell flavor of vmware by downloading it off of there support site.
My goal is to copy or backup my guest operating systems. When I try to copy the flat.vmdk, I make sure the guest OS are shutdown and in maintenance mode. In all attempts I either get the PSoD or the NIC in the Server fails to respond if the file is larger that a couple of GBs. It will not Ping out to the set gatway and it will not respond to a ping from another system. I reboot the server < thats if I don't get a PSoD> and it will respond agian. It will not respond by restarting the management agents on the console. It takes a reboot!
Other than that the server seems fine.
I have replaced the patch cables and switch, I have added a second Intel PCIe NIC to the server . I have ran all the updates for vmware and I am at update 1. The server bios is patched to 1.2.1. I have updated the onboard broadcom NIC. I have tried the datastore browser and FASTSCP to copy the files.
