This ISN’T something that occurs frequently, but it is something that I would want to test in HA (High Availabilty) before I went to production!

Sometimes when you set the DAS Isolation addresses, it fails to work, ie. when you take vswif0 offline, the virtual machines get shutdown anyway. Given this is emulating an “isolation respone”, where the service console ONLY fails to respond to the network, the virtual machines should only shutdown if the other cards in the server fails to respond.

Ideally, I want my DAS Isolation addresses in a totally seperate subnet from my service console. When I set up another Service Console, it’s always a good idea to remove HA from the cluster, wait for everything to settle down and then re-enable it on the cluster (a couple of minutes work). This makes sure both service consoles are sending heartbeats.

We can view the heartbeats via tcpdump and monitoring port 8044 by using the following commands:

# tcpdump -i vswifX port 8044
# tcpdump –i vswifY port 8044


As a final check, have a look at /var/log/vmware/aam/aam_config_util.def for the isolation addresses. It should look something like:

Start Object esx5
nodefd esx5 {
nodeAddrs = {
{
sourceType = isolation
source.addr =
destination.addr = 172.16.0.36
}
{
sourceType = isolation
source.addr =
destination.addr = 10.0.0.52
}
{
sourceType = domain
source.addr = 172.16.0.105
destination.addr = 224.0.6.127
}
{
sourceType = domain
source.addr = 10.0.0.5
destination.addr = 224.0.6.127
}
}
}

End Object esx5

Also, if das.usedefaultisolationaddress is not set to false the service console’s default gateway appears as an isolation address in the /var/log/vmware/aam/aam_config_util.def file in addition to any ip address configured with das.isolationaddress and das.isolationaddress2.

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As we all know, it’s a 440BX based mother board being fed into our virtual machines. The advantage? It’s sooooooooo generic that every operation system should be able to recognise and use it.

Has that changed in vSphere (ESX 4)?

In vSphere, the mother board remains a 400BX based board, however, it has been modified. One thing that has been added is 32 PCIe root ports, therefore I can leverage up to ten virtual network cards in a virtual machines.

Regrettably, any guest that can’t use PCIe will see the slots and address them as PCI-PCI bridges.

Occassionally, when you try to shut down a virtual machine the progress bar will stop meaning that the process will never complete in the background. The following steps will allow you to force the shutdown of a running virtual machine.

1. Logon to the ESX host where the virtual machine is running and become root.
2. vmware-cmd -l to list all the registered virtual machines.
3. vmware-cmd /path/copied/from/vmware-cmd getstate to get state of the target virtual machine.
   If the state requires an answer:
   • vmware-cmd /path/copied/from/vmware-cmd answer

   If no answer is needed:

   • vmware-cmd /path/copied/from/vmware-cmd stop trysoft

   If trysoft does not work use vmware-cmd /path/copied/from/vmware-cmd stop hard

4. If the vmware-cmd does not work, the next step is to kill the master user world id.
5. cat /proc/vmware/vm/*/names |grep vmname replace vmname with the name of the virtual machine that has hung. From this list, get the VMID
6. less /proc/vmware/vm/vmid value/cpu/status where vmid value is the number from above.
7. Scroll over to the right until you find the group field that shows vm.####. The #### numbers are the master user world id.
8. /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmkload_app -k 9 #### where #### is the master user world id. If the command is successful you will get a WARNING message that a signal 9 is being sent.
9. If vmkload_app does not help the next thing to try is to crash the virtual machine with the vm-support -X command.
10. vm-support -x to get the vmid.
11. From a directory that has ample space vm-support -X #### where #### is the vmid.
12. Answer all the questions with the default answers. The entire process takes about 10 minutes and creates an archive log that can be submitted to support. It will also crash the vm