Comments on: Important Note Regarding VMware over NFS

By: slowe

slowe — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 01:03:15 +0000

Philip, I do believe you are correct in that the patch is included in Update 3, but if I am not mistaken the changes to esx.conf still need to be made to “activate” the patch.

By: Philip Arnason

Philip Arnason — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:47:31 +0000

Ok I’ve verified, I believe once you have Update 3 the patch is no longer needed.

By: Philip Arnason

Philip Arnason — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 05:02:20 +0000

I have several 3i hosts as well, but they’re all Update 3. Anybody know if ESX350-200808401-BG is included in update 3? We are running into exactly this problem, where when using SMVI on an NFS datastore the snapshots timeout and the VM becomes unavailable for a longer time.

By: Joel

Joel — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:36:48 +0000

Just got bit by this and still recovering. We run ESXi 3.5 and I’m having a hard time finding the ESXi equivalent of “ESX350-200808401-BG”. Anyone know what it is or if it exists?

By: alastair brown

alastair brown — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 11:18:30 +0000

prefvmx.ConsolidateDeleteNFSLocks, makes the deletion of a snapshot a 2 ping loss rather thatn a ten minute ping loss

By: Dejan Ilic

Dejan Ilic — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 07:17:17 +0000

Hello.
Luckily we didn’t remove the locks on our installation and we have installed the patch as soon as it was released. Actualy I requested the patch from Vmware BEFORE it was release and their support was confused because they didn’t find it.

But whats not clear to me from you text is if we should apply the “prefvmx.ConsolidateDeleteNFSLocks” setting or not in my scenario.
Would the change futher help us when working with snapshots?

As it is today, I do notice that sometimes the deletion of snapshots tend to timeout, but the snapshot is gone after a while.

By: slowe

slowe — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:47:46 +0000

Ian,

The command “esxupdate query | grep ESX350-200808401-BG” will tell you on a per-host basis if that particular host has the patch installed. For lots of hosts, though, this most likely isn’t any quicker than using Update Manager.

By: ian

ian — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:32:27 +0000

Patch Validation. How can you tell if you have a patch/ update installed… beside proper change control! I know I can use update manager and do a baseline for an update/patch, but is there a faster way?

By: Wade H.

Wade H. — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 17:56:11 +0000

Hi Scott,

We have experienced this issue with our customers, and are currently going through contacting all that use Netapp NFS/VMware to make them aware of the update. This is an even bigger problem since ESX 3.5 update 2, as the default HA response is to leave VM’s powered on. We have also had a customer that has experienced an issue due to this combination of factors. This is critical for Netapp/VMware customers.

By: Rick Scherer

Rick Scherer — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 17:20:19 +0000

Thank you for the mention Scott, definitely did not expect that. One thing I wanted to discuss is how VMware HA functions, based from my point of view.

From what I can see when you configure VMware HA the first (4) nodes configured are marked as primary, every host after the fourth is considered a backup node. In the event of a HA fail-over the primary nodes will all attempt to start the VMs that were running on the failed node. It appears they rely on the VM locking to determine if the VM is actually down or not. So what this means is regardless of Isolation Response the VM can actually be powered on multiple times. In fact, in the couple times this has happened to me I had the same running VM on up to (3) hosts at once.

You can also see some strange behaviors in VirtualCenter, such as the number of Virtual Machines registered in each host will jump up and down within seconds. I would look at the summary of one of my hosts and see the Virtual Machine count go from 20 to 35 to 28 to 40 and so on.

The only true way to clear this up is from the service console do a `vmware-cmd -l` to see the registered VMs on each of your hosts in that cluster, you can write the output of this to a file for each server (ie: vmware-cmd -l > server1). Then once you have all the files do a sort on them (ie: sort server1 server2 server3 server4 > newfile). This new file will have all of your registered VMs in a sorted order, so you can see which VMX files have multiples. Then you can go to each host and do a `ps aux | grep VMX-FILE` to find the PID then use kill -9 PID to kill it.

I’ll work on writing a how-to page on this sometime this weekend, but I thought you should know.

Thanks again & Good Luck on your customers sites. Hopefully they had NetApp snapshots!