Today my co-worker asked me a question about memory spec on ESXi hosts. There are two types of memory, LRDIMM and RDIMM available on hardware vendor’s list. Which one is best choice?
Hardware
PCPU locked up on Cisco UCS
ESXi 5.5 Update 2 is stable version, but I got PSOD on one UCS blade few days ago. It scared me since there was a big bug when I upgraded ESXi from 5.1 to 5.5 Update 1 last year(See detail ESXi 5.5 and Emulex OneConnect 10Gb NIC), it lead to dozen virtual machines crashed over and over again.I bet I’m gonna to die if it happens again. 🙂
ESXi 5.5 Update 2 算得上比较稳定的版本了，但前几天遇到一台紫屏，差点儿吓尿了。半年前从ESXi 5.1升级到ESXi5.5 Update 1时候遇到个大BUG（详情见我的文章ESXi 5.5 and Emulex OneConnect 10Gb NIC），搞得几十台几十台机器挂，这次升级再来一次估计职业生涯就此结束了。
ESXi 5.5 and Emulex OneConnect 10Gb NIC
*** English Version ***
You are using HP ProLiant BL460c G7 or Gen8, ESXi version is 5.5, NIC is Emulex chipset. You are using driver version 10.x.x.x. You may experience the host randomly lost connectivity on vCenter Server, host status show “No responding”. You cannot ping any virtual machine hosted on the blade. High pause frame is observed on HP virtual connect model down links after problem occurred. And you see similar error in vmkernel logs:
How to Change SCSI Controller Type on Virtual Machine
Some of my virtual machines used ISL logical SCSI controller. It’s not recommended for Red Hat 6 virtual machines. We need to change it to VMware Paravirtual SCSI controller.
Basically the steps is power off virtual machine, change the SCSI controller type, and power on. Then you lost operation system. 🙂
Unexpected Failover on UCS Manager After Upgrade Firmware Version to 2.2.x
I noticed UCS Manager got unexpected failover after we upgraded firmware to 2.2(2c). Looks like it hits a bug CSCuo11700. Firmware should be upgraded to 2.2.(3a) to fix the issue.
Blue Screen with Bug Check 50 on ESXi 5.x
Some critical VMs got blue screen in last few weeks. After working with OS and hardware vendor, we figured out the root cause eventually. It’s a CPU problem related to Intel v2 CPU of E3, E5 and E7 families. The detail information is documented in VMware KB Windows 2008 R2 and Solaris 10 64-bit virtual machines blue screen or kernel panic when running on ESXi 5.x with an Intel E5 v2 series processor.
Firmware upgrading is pending on install in progress on HP ESXi 5.5 blade by HP SUM
In my post HP Blade Firmware Upgrading Best Practices for ESXi Host I mentioned HP released firmware and drivers by SPP image. I have set my ESXi 5.5 baseline to SPP2014.06 as I have tested it in my lab environment. Looks like stable.
How to get HP ProLiant blade server and enclosure information
An enterprise infrastructure administrator needs to run plenty of reports for firmware, software version, or any kind of infrastructure data in their day-to-day operation. Some vendors provide powerful tools to pull out data from their solution, but what if you don’t have such tools? It is pain to get data manually especially for large number of servers. I’m going to share my trick to you. I’ll use HP ProLiant blade system for example, as it’s very common case in enterprise datacenter.
HP Blade Firmware Upgrading Best Practices for ESXi Host
I discussed this topic with a group, some people think firmware upgrade is not required if ESXi host working fine, that’s adapted to small business, but I think enterprise can do more better. My ESXi running on HP blades, I’ll use that platform for example to share my thought and experience. Why you need a … Read more
Windows cannot be installed on drive 0 partition 1
I think Windows Server 2012 will be next popular server OS just like Windows Server 2008, it’s also a nice hypervisor OS on virtual world. How do you think? Installation is first step to experience the wonderful OS, you may see some strange problem during that step just like me. Today’s topic occurred long time … Read more