For a customer I placed a  SQL server, which has a disk size of about 900 MB, on “cheap” iSCSI SAN with a dual 10 GB link. This was not the only Virtual Machine on the iSCSI hardware there where about 13 LUN defined with each about 6 virtual machines. I “doubted” if”  this machine was a candidate for this particular iSCSI solution but measurements of the environment showed me that it was possible.

It seems to went well but after a few days I got complaining users and i saw this graph (see below) ! It seems that something has changed on January the 17th. From that day the SQL server is bean heavily loaded with import jobs that will run every night. Because the customer want to have the latest production data for testing and training the virtual machine characteristic changed dramatically du to this adjustment!

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In a upgrade process form ESX 4.0 to ESXi 4.1 we reinstalled a Blade servers(BL 460c G6) by script. In our update process steps there is a step Un-present all LUN that are presented to the related host. This is done to be sure that the installation will not install on a LUN that is presented. And here is where the human factor kicked in we forgot 1 LUN the was presented to the host. This was a LUN that was presented form the Test and Development  environment and this was temporally but not temporally  enough So when running the installation script he saw that LUN (CLUN002)  as the first disk and in the script it says install on first disk See this article. In the beginning we did noticed that the installation failed but with a adjustment of the script it worked. And all Virtual machine just keep running. The next morning all look well until some of the virtual machine went for a planed reboot and did not come up any more. At this point we know we had a storage issue because the rebooted virtual Machines gave a Orphaned error. Some machine where not rebooted and could not be accessed though the vCenter Console option but could be accessed through RDP and where alive and well.

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Last week is saw a message in vCenter that i have noticed before:

Warning message from <host FQDN>: Insufficient video RAM. The maximum resolution of the virtual machine will be limited to 1176×885. To use the configured maximum resolution of 2560×1600, increase the amount of video RAM allocated to this virtual machine by setting svga.vramSize="16384000" in the virtual machine’s configuration file.warning<date – time – virtual machine name> Vpxuser

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I recenty had some some problems with the reset of a Virtual Machine on an ESX4i host. It hung on 95% and was unresponsive.
Avoiding a complete reboot of the ESX host, I went trough some site’s and finally had the answer to the problem. Here are the steps i took:
1.At the ESXi console, press alt+F1
2.Type: unsupported
3.Enter the root password
4.Type ps
5.Second column before the VM name (wich has the problem) is the pid of the vmkload_app of the troubled VM
6.Kill -9 (pid)
Now check the VM state, it should be off. You can now boot the machine again.