Machine Restarting After vMotion in ESX 3.5 Update 3

      by Wyatt Walter

I ran into a nasty bug in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3 during an implementation at work and thoght I’d share the solution. The bug is a known issue with VMware and I found the documentation with the workaround. The problem goes something like this: after vMotion’ing or starting up a virtual machine guest on an ESX 3.5 Update 3 host with HA turned on with virtual machine monitoring enabled., the machine may reboot. The issue is caused by a delay in the heartbeats from the VMware tools on the guest and VMware HA does it job and kills the existing instance and boots up a new one. The workaround is to add the following line in the vmsvc section of the /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml file and restarting the HA management services:

<heartbeatDelayInSecs>0</heartbeatDelayInSecs>

You can also turn Virtual Machine Monitoring off, but by adding the line you can leave VM monitoring on. You can find the actual VMware Knowledgebase article here.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Feb 5th, 2009