Problems with VM after upgrade to 3.5

[pontus75]

Hi!

After upgrading to 3.5 we got problems with a virtual machine, alot of eventid 11 and eventid 15 began to show up in the eventlog, next to each other (this didn't happen prior to the 3.5 upgrade). The problem (or atleast a similar problem) is described in a Microsoft kb, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/895573, but what is the chance of this happening at the same time as the upgrade. The vm is connected to a MSA1000, and it seems that it's happening only when there are some load on the machine (which act as a fileserver).

Event Type: Error

Event Source: Disk

Event Category: None

Event ID: 11

User: N/A

Description:

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1.

-

---

Event Type: Error

Event Source: vmscsi

Event Category: None

Event ID: 15

User: N/A

Description:

The device, \Device\Scsi\vmscsi1, is not ready for access yet.

[java_cat33]

Hi - this could well be due to the fact that the MSA 1000 is not supported by ESX 3.5

In fact - only certain EVA's are supported as far as HP goes...

Check this guide from VMWare on page 10 of the pdf

[pontus75]

Yes, I noticed this, but this problem is isolated to this single vm, and not to any of the other vms connected to the same san. I also noticed that the buslogic driver is used (it's a win2003 r2 server which is converted from a physical), is it likely that this be the culprit?

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Check your /var/log/vmkernel file for corresponding SCSI Reservation Errors. If you have too many of these (easy to do on an MSA1000) then that may be the issue. What else is happening on the LUN the vmdk resides? Are you currently running via snapshot?

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education. As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[pontus75]

Hi

I checked the logfiles you pointed out, and see alot of messages with alot of warnings concerning scsi error, maybe I should look closer here and try to find the real reason, thanks for the hint in the right direction.

[pontus75]

If anyone want to know, the problem was a defective harddrive in the msa1000, replacing that fixed the problem. (the harddrive didn't show any red lights indicating it might be defective)

[pontus75]

If anyone want to know, the problem was a defective harddrive in the msa1000, replacing that fixed the problem. (the harddrive didn't show any red lights indicating it might be defective)

[keithw_nz]

Hi All,

We had the same issue on a W2K3 Exchange Server 2003 VM that was VMWare Converted from physical to virtual into VI3.5. The VI3.5 hosts run on HP bl480c in an HP c7000 rack enclosure, connected to an HP EVA4000. None of the other (similarly) imported VMs showed this issue - note that the VMWare Converter defaulted to Buslogic controllers for all the created VMs.

The resolution was to change the VM controller to LSI Logic. In our case, we injected an LSI driver into the Guest OS via a WinPE bootdisk. As it happens, this process of ours injects a non-VMWare driver: LSI Logic PCI-X Ultra320 Host Adapter, v 5.2.3790.1830. As this driver worked, we did not feel the need (as yet) to force it back to the vmscsi driver.

As an aside - vmxnet: Some VMWare Converter-imported VMs detected the NIC as an AMD PCI Adapter (reporting 10Mbps), not as the VMWare Accelerated AMD PCI Adapter even though the VMWare Tools were installed. Easy enough, though, to update the driver and point it to C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\Drivers\vmxnet. Voila ! However, at the moment, a number of these VMs show very high Network Output Queue Length, and (related?) ARCserve TCP timeouts with the ARCserve Universal agent - which we are investigating.....

[txvmware]

I second the above post as far as problems, one of my converted sql servers created a amd standard adapter and an accelerated one and converted to buslogic vs lsi like the rest. Am in the process of changing over to lsi with almost the same identical setup with blades only differences is stonefly san being used.