Thanks. I knew about logging into the host using vSphere client, and that works well, but I need to do this in a script.
I don't have any lines containing "login" in my vmauthd log file. I do have lines for the vpxuser, but no IP addresses on that line. I see plenty of my vCenter server's IP address, but also other IP addresses. I think the log files may have what I need, I just need a way to reliably find the server I'm looking for.
Hi Jim-
Could you expand on your final solution. I have Server 2012E R2 in a VM and several ESXi datastores that I would like to pass to the VM and then set up a storage space. Just not sure how to do it. I know this thread is old but you seem to be asking the same question that I have now.
Thanks,
James
yes , Guest CPU and Host CPU may not be same always depending on the vCPU assigned. So if your having difference between two hosts then it could be a different situation,
are you using any resource pools..??
Hey guys,
I need to some help pretty bad here.
I have multiple datastores most of which are VMFS 5 except for one which is VMFS 3. Today I powered down my box to check something in the bios (no change made), but when the system got back up, the VMFS 3 datastore was unreadable.
I then followed some online tutorial and set try to fix the partition table. However, I set the partition table to GPT when I think the VMFS 3 store was MBR.
My steps:
1. partedUtil getUsableSectors /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.50015179590f8c3f
This gave me a message along the line of no partition or invalid partition. Can't remember.
2. partedUtil setptbl /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.50015179590f8c3f gpt "1 2048 4123456 AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 0"
Then I did the above as per an online tutorial and forgetting that my datastore was VMFS3 and MBR. 
3. partedUtil getUsableSectors /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.50015179590f8c3f
This gave me a result of 312581774
4. partedUtil setptbl /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.50015179590f8c3f gpt "1 2048 312581774 AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 0"
Then I did part 4 - again following the tutorial
Clearly these steps were the wrong thing to do for my disk. Can anyone help with fixing all this?
Below is the affected disk. It shows the disk as mounted, but ESXi is not able to find the existing volume and mount the VMs on it.
Also, here is the KB I followed: VMware KB: Recreating a missing VMFS datastore partition in VMware vSphere 5.0/5.1/5.5
More info (following http://virtuallyhyper.com/2012/09/recreating-vmfs-partitions-using-hexdump/):
~ # hexdump -C -n 512 /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.50015179590f8c3f
00000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
*
000001b0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 1d 9a 00 00 |................|
000001c0 01 00 ee fe ff ff 01 00 00 00 af 9e a1 12 00 00 |................|
000001d0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
*
000001f0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 55 aa |..............U.|
00000200
~ # hexdump -C -s 65536 -n 512 /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.50015179590f8c3f
00010000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
*
00010200
~ # hexdump -C -s 1114112 -n 512 /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.50015179590f8c3f
00110000 0d d0 01 c0 03 00 00 00 11 00 00 00 01 1a 00 00 |................|
00110010 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
00110020 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 43 56 |..............CV|
00110030 50 4f 39 34 38 31 30 31 32 36 31 36 30 41 47 4e |PO94810126160AGN|
00110040 20 20 49 4e 54 45 4c 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 | INTEL ........|
00110050 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 82 |................|
00110060 14 43 25 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 54 02 00 00 53 02 |.C%.......T...S.|
00110070 00 00 03 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 10 01 00 00 |................|
00110080 00 00 28 ff 64 4b fe 02 43 47 97 22 00 e0 ed 0d |..(.dK..CG."....|
00110090 0b 0e 1c 98 65 d6 6d 7e 04 00 83 02 3e b0 4b f0 |....e.m~....>.K.|
001100a0 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
001100b0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 c5 ae 95 01 00 00 |................|
001100c0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
*
00110200
~ # fdisk -lu /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.50015179590f8c3f
***
*** The fdisk command is deprecated: fdisk does not handle GPT partitions. Please use partedUtil
***
Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT
Disk /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.50015179590f8c3f: 312581808 sectors, 298M
Logical sector size: 512
Disk identifier (GUID): 19700107-395f-4915-a262-03dda5266ea5
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 312581774
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 312581774 298M 0700
~ #
I would suggest to look at vmmark:
Well, I ended up using vmfs-fuse to recover the data: VMFS: Unsupported version 5 - How to mount VMFS5 on Ubuntu |My Technical Blog
It truly sucks that ESXi itself could not read the disk.
After updating this night to ESXi 5.1 Update 02
(build no. 1483097
file update-from-esxi5.1-5.1_update02.zip)
I get the error:
An unknown connection error occurred. (The client could not send a complete request to the server. (The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send.))
I am connecting from an XP client, I have googled this issue:
vCenter Server 5.1 Update 2 Release Notes
which explains it (I think), but the solution is for vCenter. How to solve it without vCenter.
Regards, Lars.
Welcome to the Community,
although the KB article only mentions version 5.5, you may try and see whether http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2049143 will help.
André
I need a button here where I can click EXTREEMLY helpful...
Thanks.
The fix when running XP 32 bit is to edit config.xml like in your link.
Regards, Lars.
Hi James,
My final solution involved a battery backed RAID controller supported by ESXi 5.5. I'm now running only VMFS, no Storage Spaces, only normal windows shares, with virtual disks. I did this because of performance issues and flexibility.
My problem was that using a passthrough controller for a VM would cause it to be a "static" VM, without the flexibility ESXi offers.
Furthermore ESXi has very poor performance using local drives that are NOT cached. To my understanding ESXi does not offer write/read cache, which makes mechanical harddrives(non-ssd) extremely slow. At least that was my experience.
I dropped Storage Spaces, because it makes no sense running a RAID10 -> VMFS -> Storage Space solution. Storage Spaces only works well if the drives are non-RAID, passed directly through to W2K12, so you can take advantage of the flexibility that Storage Spaces offer(mixing raid levels on the same drives).
Hope this helps
/Jim
My VMware host had a power failure yesterday morning and one of my VM's seem to suffer form this.
My setup is in some way simple and is a ESXi host with two VM's and i based as this:
ESXi 5.1 run on USB with two separate storage disks. One disk for one VM (still working) and another disk with the other VM and a .locker folder (not working).
When I discovered the crash I had to remove the VM's from the inventory through the vmware-client as the were shown as "unknown". Then I tried to add both VM's to the inventory again - the first successfully and then started my problems with the other VM.
When I tried to add this to the inventory I didn't have the option to do this as it were "grayed out"!
Then I started google around and discovered that I might had a problem with a locked file in the VMDIR and I did find a .lck file. And I did some test (vmkfstools -D) and discover that my the VM were locked but I got some different readings like this:
vmkfstools -D /vmfs/volumes/516ac177-2009a248-6f97-001617628430/mail.XXXXXX.com/mail.XXXXXX.com.vmdk
Lock [type 10c00001 offset 18870272 v 168, hb offset 3981824
gen 115, mode 0, owner 00000000-00000000-0000-000000000000 mtime 1453
num 0 gblnum 0 gblgen 0 gblbrk 0]
Addr <4, 20, 30>, gen 80, links 1, type reg, flags 0, uid 0, gid 0, mode 600
len 533, nb 0 tbz 0, cow 0, newSinceEpoch 0, zla 4305, bs 8192
vmkfstools -D /vmfs/volumes/516ac177-2009a248-6f97-001617628430/mail.XXXXXX.com/mail.XXXXXX.com.vmx
Lock [type 10c00001 offset 18810880 v 279, hb offset 3981312
gen 25, mode 1, owner 522ca7ed-9b3b0640-0fcd-001617628430 mtime 120587
num 0 gblnum 0 gblgen 0 gblbrk 0]
Addr <4, 20, 1>, gen 2, links 1, type reg, flags 0, uid 0, gid 0, mode 100755
len 2899, nb 1 tbz 0, cow 0, newSinceEpoch 1, zla 2, bs 8192
My MAC address is identically to 001617628430
Then I tried to remove the .lck file in the vmware-client but were not allowed to do this (I think the message were "GOT ERROR"). Then I tried to remove the .lck file through SSH and got another error this time "Input/output error".
After a long time poking around on the internet searching for the golden answer I had realised that were not able to do anything with any of the files in the VMDIR and every time I tried to do something in SSH I got errors like "Input/output error", "Input/output error (327689)" and thorough another test I discovered also that all the files gave me the error "disk chain is not consistent"!
I have also noised that I weren't able to copy any of the files to another location or download them to my computer.
I have also noised there seem to be similar problems regarding the .locker folder. Here I'm not able to open (ex. logs), copy or download any files! Therefore is also suspect there might be at problem concerning this issue.
I don't suspect that the disk have a hardware problem in fact I have som old (inactive) VM's on this "problem disk" but I have no problem in coping or downloading these files!
As often (for us all) this is a critical loss if I can't startup this VM again or at least in some way get my data from these files as this hold my entire mail-system include contacts, calender etc.
I feel my hands are bound and I'm heading down a dead end.
If your can give me a solution or shed some light I will be more than pleased :-)
All the best regards to all of you
Be_a_EZ
Hi
Welcome to the communities.
Could you please review log form below path and link.
/var/log/vmkernel log file
Hi
Welcome to the communities.
Please run below two command and sahre the output
This command shows the partitions and volumes within the .vmdk file.
vmware-mount /p
Determine which partition to mount. In the following example, this partition appears as N. vmware-mount /v:N R: diskfile.vmdk
Hi Ethan44
Am I looking the right place because I can't seem to find the log file (vmware.log) your asking for:
Here is what I see in /var/log/
| boot.gz | esxcli.log | smbios.bin | vmkdevmgr.log |
| configRP.log ipmi | sysboot.log | vmware |
Hi
Welcome to the communities.
IF you dint followed please go through bewlo link.
http://www.vmware.com/in/advantages/robust/scalability.html
Hi
Welcome to the communities.
Here you go .
https://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_disk_add_raw.html
I was wondering if you could marry two VMs together so that in the event of a host failure, They will alway remain together on the same host.
You could create a DRS rule for this (keep virtual machines together). HA and DRS can compliment eachother and in the event of a host failure, DRS will ensure both VM's stay together. You do this on the edit settings part of your cluster. See a screenshot here:
hello all,
we have installed VMware ESXi 5.5.0 build-1331820 on a new dell poweredge t420 with 32gb of ram and over 1tb of hd space. there are 2 vm servers running 2012r2 and a lab win7pro vm, total of three hosts. esxi was installed on a 1gb sd card pre installed from factory.
for the past couple of days the host has crashed, see attached picture. I have tried downloading the 211mb dumb file from the datastore but it errors out when it tries to download the file onto my workstation (or any other workstation).
can someone please help.
Maybe I'm asking for the wrong client.
I've been using the VMware vSpher Client 5.1 & 5.5 (free). I don't know if it's ESX or ESXi.
I can download the 5.1 version, when I type the IP into a web browser:
When I install either, I never see: "At this point select "Install, preserve VMFS datastore". This will reinstall ESXi and you will then need to reconfigure the host (networking ...) and re-add the VM to the host's inventory by right clicking it's .vmx file in the datastore browser."
