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VM problems after ESXi upgrade
I recently upgraded ESXi Free on three physical servers, from 6.7, to the latest 7.0 Update 2. Rather than do an in-place upgrade, I simply installed the 7.2 on new USB flash drives, then re-registered the existing VMs. This seemed to go smoothly, and the VMs started up fine.
I left everything for a few days, but then started noticing problems; when I went to edit a VM, the properties page wouldn't open. Same with restarts or shutdowns; it doesn't matter whether I perform any of these operations in a browser or from VMWare Workstation, the same thing happens - the VM goes into a sort of hang state and becomes unavailable. It even happens if I tell VMs to shutdown or restart from within Windows. I can issue a power off command which eventually works, after about an hour.
If I reboot the host machine, everything seems to work as it should straight after booting. When I come back next day, problems happen again. I'll emphasise that all VMs function perfectly unless I go to a. edit one, or b. perform a power operation (shutdown, restart).
Interestingly, the older machine (which is full of HDDs) is unaffected. The two newer machines (full of SSDs) are the problem ones. The older server has a couple of RAID1 arrays, and the two problem ones are on RAID10 - one has Avago MegaRAID, and the other is an Intel RAID controller (I think).
When it was on ESXi 6.7, latterly I'd installed the Avago StorCLI on one of them, but it worked fine without it for a long time. I haven't installed any additional RAID-related software on the new 7.0U2 - is this where I'm going wrong?
It 'feels' like a storage issue - does anyone have any suggestions? Any advice greatly appreciated!
Thanks
EDIT: I've upgraded the hardware compatibility on a couple of them, and installed VMWare Tools 11.3.0, but this doesn't seem to help.
I left everything for a few days, but then started noticing problems; when I went to edit a VM, the properties page wouldn't open. Same with restarts or shutdowns; it doesn't matter whether I perform any of these operations in a browser or from VMWare Workstation, the same thing happens - the VM goes into a sort of hang state and becomes unavailable. It even happens if I tell VMs to shutdown or restart from within Windows. I can issue a power off command which eventually works, after about an hour.
If I reboot the host machine, everything seems to work as it should straight after booting. When I come back next day, problems happen again. I'll emphasise that all VMs function perfectly unless I go to a. edit one, or b. perform a power operation (shutdown, restart).
Interestingly, the older machine (which is full of HDDs) is unaffected. The two newer machines (full of SSDs) are the problem ones. The older server has a couple of RAID1 arrays, and the two problem ones are on RAID10 - one has Avago MegaRAID, and the other is an Intel RAID controller (I think).
When it was on ESXi 6.7, latterly I'd installed the Avago StorCLI on one of them, but it worked fine without it for a long time. I haven't installed any additional RAID-related software on the new 7.0U2 - is this where I'm going wrong?
It 'feels' like a storage issue - does anyone have any suggestions? Any advice greatly appreciated!
Thanks
EDIT: I've upgraded the hardware compatibility on a couple of them, and installed VMWare Tools 11.3.0, but this doesn't seem to help.
VirtualizationVMware* ESXi 7.0
Last Comment
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)