ESXi
VI3 Extended Support
Feb 1st
Sorry to keep going on about VI3 but I alluded to the end of General Support in a previous post and thought it might be nice just to expand on it a bit.
VMware explain their support lifecycle policies here and basically the clock started ticking for VI3 support the day that vSphere went GA. VI3 moves into extended support on 21st May 2010. That’s only 4 months away.
So what does Extended Support mean? This is VMware’s definition:
New hardware platforms are no longer supported, new guest OS updates may or may not be applied, and bug fixes are limited to critical issues. Critical bugs are deviations from specified product functionality that cause data corruption, data loss, system crash, or significant customer application down time and there is no work-around that can be implemented.
ESX / ESXi 3.5 Update 4 Released
Mar 31st
Yesterday, VMware announced the availability of ESX / ESXi 3.5 Update 4 (build number 153875). As usual you can view the release notes for all of the juicy details but in summary they are: More >
HA Agent on ESX-HOST in cluster CLUSTER-NAME has an error
Feb 24th
If I wanted to, this could be a very big post all about configuring HA correctly. But I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Instead I just want to share my experiences with this error:
HA Agent on ESX-HOST in cluster CLUSTER-NAME has an error
Odds are that you will eventually see this one pop up in vCenter for one of your ESX 3.x hosts. If you’re not sure what it means, well the translation basically is that the host displaying the error could fail and your VMs running on it probably won’t get started up automatically on another host. Essentially HA is broken on the host. More >
Communication with the virtual machine may have been interrupted
Feb 11th
I was trying to power up a new VM on an ESX 3.5 host just now and I got the following error:
“A general system error ocurred: The system returned an error. Communication with the virtual machine may have been interrupted”
Nice and helpful!
It appears that there are two ways to fix this. The first is to reboot your ESX host. Of course this isn’t normally practical and you may have VMs running. The alternative is to make your way into the service console and issue the following command:
service mgmt-vmware restartAssuming that no errors are displayed as the service is restarted you should be sound as a pound (although these days the £ isn’t worth much).
