Category Archives: KB
VMware ESXi 5.0, Patch Release ESXi500-201112001
VMWare released new image for ESXi5.0 on 15th December. Following bugs are fixed. List is huge but following made sense to me
- This image profile enables support for Mac OS X 10.7 and Mac OS X 10.7.1.
Mac OS X 10.7.2 is not supported by this patch release. - vMotion fails with the A general system error occurred: Failed to flush checkpoint data! error message when:
- The resolution of the virtual machines is higher than 1280×1024, or smaller if you are using a second screen
- The guest operating system is using the WDDM driver (Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 2008, Windows Vista)
- The virtual machine is using Virtual Machine Hardware version 8.
- Creating host profiles of ESX i 5.0 hosts might fail when the host profile creation process is unable to resolve the hostname and IP address of the host by relying on the DNS for hostname and IP address lookup. An error message similar to the following is displayed:
Call”HostProfileManager.CreateProfile” for object “HostProfileManager” on vCenter Server”<Server_Name> failed.
Error extracting indication configuation: [Errno- 2] Name or service not known. - In vSphere 5.0, Thin Provisioning is enabled by default on devices that adhere to T10 standards. On such thin provisioned LUNs, vSphere issues SCSI UNMAP commands to help the storage arrays reclaim unused space. Sending UNMAP commands might cause performance issues with operations such as snapshot consolidation or storage vMotion. This patch resolves the issue by disabling the space reclamation feature, by default.
- It also provides you with the option of configuring the iSCSI initiator login timeout value for software iSCSI and dependent iSCSI adapters.
For example, to set the login timeout value to 10 seconds you can use commands similar to the following:
~ # vmkiscsi-tool -W -a “login_timeout=10″ vmhba37
~ # esxcli iscsi adapter param set -A vmhba37 -k LoginTimeout -v 10
The default login timeout value is 5 seconds and the maximum value that you can set is 60 seconds. We recommend that you change the login timeout value only if suggested by the storage vendor.
- The updated tools-light VIB updates the pre-built kernel driver modules for Ubuntu 10.04.3, Ubuntu 11.04, and Ubuntu 11.10. In addition, it also resolves the following issues:
- When VMware Tools installed on a Windows XP virtual machine running on an ESXi 5.0 host patched with ESXi500-201109001 is upgraded using the automatic upgrade option, a warning message similar to the following might be displayed in the Software Installation window of the virtual machine: The software you are installing has not passed Windows Logo testing to verify its compatibility with Windows XP.
This issue also occurs when VMware Tools is installed by using the Install/Upgrade Tools option and selecting the complete mode, or custom mode with LSI driver selected.
- When a virtual machine with Windows 2003 guest operating system is installed with a Windows XP display driver model (XPDM) driver, the virtual machine might stop responding with a malloc() in vmx_fb.dll error and fails with a blue screen and STOP 8E vmx_fb.dll error.
This VIB updates the VMware display driver version to 11.7.10.0.
- VMXNET 3 driver versions 1.0.25.0-k to 1.1.17.0-k fail to activate the device if the number of vCPUs that you assign to a virtual machine is not a power of two. You might see an error message similar to the following while running the demsg command:
Failed to activate dev eth0:error 1
- An error message similar to the following might be written to vmware.log:
VMXNET3 user: failed to activate Ethernet1 with status 0xbad0007
The updated net-e1000 and net-e1000e VIBs resolve a security issue in the e1000 and e1000e Linux drivers for Intel PRO/1000 adapters that allows a remote attacker to bypass packet filters and send manipulated packets.
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2009-4536 to this issue.
- The updated misc-drivers VIB resolves an issue where if software FCoE drivers are used with NICs that support partial FCoE offload, the ESXi host might fail to boot on Cisco’s UCS rack-mount servers and stops responding with a backtrace similar to the following on the purple screen:
VMware KB: Processors and guest operating systems that support VMware Fault Tolerance
VMware KB: Processors and guest operating systems that support VMware Fault Tolerance.
Note: A virtual machine can be FT-enabled while powered on only if marked with “ON” in the following table. The processor types that support this are also listed. Otherwise, the virtual machine must be powered off before FT is enabled
ESXi 5.0 Host Log Files
New logs file are introduced in ESXi5.0. I’ve bolded them.
Logs for an ESXi 5.0 host are grouped according to the source component:
/var/log/auth.log: ESXi Shell authentication success and failure./var/log/dhclient.log: DHCP client service, including discovery, address lease requests and renewals./var/log/esxupdate.log: ESXi patch and update installation logs./var/log/hostd.log: Host management service logs, including virtual machine and host Task and Events, communication with the vSphere Client and vCenter Servervpxaagent, and SDK connections./var/log/shell.log: ESXi Shell usage logs, including enable/disable and every command entered. For more information, see the Managing vSphere with Command-Line Interfaces section of the vSphere 5 Command Line documentation and Auditing ESXi Shell logins and commands in ESXi 5.x (2004810)./var/log/sysboot.log: Early VMkernel startup and module loading./var/log/syslog.log: Management service initialization, watchdogs, scheduled tasks and DCUI use./var/log/usb.log: USB device arbitration events, such as discovery and pass-through to virtual machines./var/log/vob.log: VMkernel Observation events, similar tovob.component.event./var/log/vmkernel.log: Core VMkernel logs, including device discovery, storage and networking device and driver events, and virtual machine startup./var/log/vmkwarning.log: A summary of Warning and Alert log messages excerpted from the VMkernel logs./var/log/vmksummary.log: A summary of ESXi host startup and shutdown, and an hourly heartbeat with uptime, number of virtual machines running, and service resource consumption. For more information, see Format of the ESXi 5.0 vmksummary log file (2004566).
Logs from vCenter Server Components on ESXi 5.0
When an ESXi 5.0 host is managed by vCenter Server 5.0, two components are installed, each with its own logs:
/var/log/vpxa.log: vCenter Servervpxaagent logs, including communication with vCenter Server and the Host Managementhostdagent./var/log/fdm.log: vSphere High Availability logs, produced by thefdmservice. For more information, see the vSphere HA Security section of the vSphere 5.0 Availability Guide.
