Esxi + rc2 = weekly reset of host machine ?
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It's a brand new Dell R310 running pfsense on top of esxi 4.1
I put an exact duplicate of that machine in a different school today, will check later this week if similar issue's occur.
Also the problem descibed above is the result of an update from RC1 to snapshot of may 25th … perhaps even a clean install would fix it. Problem is that highschool students and teachers get hysterical when i plug their internet to try something ;)
Have there been any driver changes (e1000 VM nic) from RC1 to RC2 ?
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Setup another virtual machine next to the one that has problems. Do a fresh install and configure it the same way, but with different IP addresses so you can test next to the prduction environment…
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on the esxi console (ie. the keyboard directly attached to the machine) i try to reboot the esxi host machine … this does not work (it seems to be waiting for something)
The only option i have is to cold boot the esxi host machine to get stuff back online !!
I have no logs, no errors, all seems to get lost with the cold boot.
For now i've reverted back to the rc1.
I didn't think it was possible that VM "killed" a host machine put apparently it is .......
You have a problem in your host then, no VM can kill the host (short of an ESX bug but that's highly unlikely).
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http://fcaltdit.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/powering-off-a-virtual-machine-on-an-esxi-host/
seems like "unresponsive" vm's can cause esxi to malfunction, as in not being able to power them off or on.
kill -9 seems to be the only option in that caseperhaps that is what is happening on my server
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Which version of ESXi?
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4.1 / latest build i could find on their official website ….
perhaps i should try the custom builds by dell
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Have you installed VmWare tools on the Pfsense VM??
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Thx :) Which type of virtual machine have you chosen??
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i guess a regular 64-bit freebsd setup, using the e1000 nics
so far the old RC1 doesn't seem to cause any issues, so i'm still guessing something went wrong with the auto-update from rc1 to rc2
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Reinstall on 32 bit freebsd and see if it betters the situation. Best advice I can give based on the information.
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I'd double check your bios on that Dell to ensure you're running the latest suggested version. Make sure you also check the HCL on vmware.com for your version of ESXi (http://tinyurl.com/3pp2ynf). I've seen similar problems when there is a bad RAID card involved.
Sean
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It ran fine for around 2 months … then "suddenly" it started.
But i doubt it is a hardware issue.
The reason i doubt this is because
The crashes allways happen on a saturday (today is the 3rd time in a row). Also it does not seem to be related with the update to RC2 as today the old RC1 VM crashed.I'm starting to think me or a collegue must have installed some package that is coded to do something on a saturday that causes the VM to go unresponsive .
What packages could do this ?
AFAIK we have the following installed:
squid + squidguard (they ran for 2 months without issues)
lightsquid (been installed for a couple of weeks without issues)
ntop (probably most recently installed package and most likely suspect ?) -
If your host is still unresponsive you're chasing the wrong problem, it's an ESX issue completely unrelated to the guest(s) if the host doesn't behave.
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I had the issue with a windows 2008 machine on an early Vpshere snapshot. So not entirely….
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i went over there today, it's a national holliday so nobody around needing internet. I reinstalled esxi and a clean install of pfsense using snapshot of june 12.
I used the dell custom esxi (it might have more up to date drivers for dell hardware).
Pfsense installed with minimal packages required (only squid and squidguard were added).Also @cmb:
i tried installing squidguard before squid was installed… This install did not complete giving an error bout a missing file (some squid config file).
I Manually installed squid. then squidguard reinstalled without issues.