Practical Technology

Honest to goodness. Mar 25 07:12:26 osh-esx-1 vmkernel: 9:12:00:32.092 cpu1:4210) 0000:01:00.0: vmnic0: Link is Down I'm at a loss with this system. At the same time my iSCSI box powered itself off, and it gives me the most informative: The operating system started at system time ‎2010‎-‎03‎-‎25T11:15:02.484375000Z. Lovely. Once I'm back from my vacation (starting tomorrow morning for a week), I'm nuking everything and starting fresh - it is a lab, after all. If I continue to get errors, I'm replacing the RAID card - my faux PERC5i - with a PERC6i. At that point I'm also going to reconsider my storage infrastructure. I may give Windows another shot, and hope it indeed was the RAID card. Or, if I can find a storage filer that does iSCSI and MPIO, I'll give that a shot. I'm truly constrained by the gigabit network - when doing VM deployments it maxes out at 50% on the line, either one or two VM deployments. Of course, this is all silly...I don't nee...

Let's start with the errors I was seeing in: /var/log/vmkernel Everything was fine until this showed up: Mar 10 22:09:13 osh-esx-1 vmkernel: 0:00:06:47.624 cpu0:4096) e1000: vmnic2: e1000_clean_tx_irq: Detected Tx Unit Hang Mar 10 22:09:13 osh-esx-1 vmkernel: Tx Queue Mar 10 22:09:13 osh-esx-1 vmkernel: TDH Mar 10 22:09:13 osh-esx-1 vmkernel: TDT Mar 10 22:09:13 osh-esx-1 vmkernel: next_to_use Mar 10 22:09:13 osh-esx-1 vmkernel: next_to_clean Mar 10 22:09:13 osh-esx-1 vmkernel: buffer_info[next_to_clean] Mar 10 22:09:13 osh-esx-1 vmkernel: t Mar 10 22:09:15 osh-esx-1 vmkernel: 0:00:06:49.377 cpu7:4256)WARNING: iscsi_vmk: iscsivmk_ConnReceiveAtomic: vmhba34:CH:0 T:1 CN:0: Failed to receive data: Connection reset by peer Mar 10 22:09:15 osh-esx-1 vmkernel: 0:00:06:49.377 cpu7:4256)WARNING: iscsi_vmk: iscsivmk_ConnReceiveAtomic: Sess [ISID: 00023d000001 TARGET: workstation-disks TPGT: 1 TSIH: 0] Mar 10 22:09:15 osh-esx-1 vmkernel: 0:00:06:49.377 cpu7:4256)WARNING: iscsi_vmk: iscsivmk_...

I'm now running ESX within Workstation. It connects via a separate Gb NIC to the iSCSI switch on to Starwind 2TB imagefile. On the other Gb NIC is the LAN/Service console. Note if you want to use NFS to host your ISOs on the iSCSI server: Completely doable, but if you find yourself getting 'NFS Error: Unable to Mount filesystem', it's probably because you either don't have the NFS Client firewall rule enabled, or you haven't added a VMkernel to your LAN vSwitch. I just added one with an IP address on the LAN's subnet. Did that, works like a charm now! Oh yeah, you need root access enabled in the NFS properties on the server that is hosting your NFS share. I also had the NUMA CPU error on booting up ESX4 inside Workstation 7. The following link fixed it: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/244537 (the post by dmadden) I've since installed ESXi since this will be a permanent install (also got the NUMA CPU error). Oddly enough, NFS works fine, but iSCSI r...