Category Archives: Problems

What do these SATA errors mean?

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For SATA drives, occasional transmission problems are expected even on otherwise pretty healthy systems. No need to worry about it too much unless the problem repeats itself a lot.

via What do these SATA errors mean / kernel 2.6.25.6 (DRDY ERR/ICRC ABRT) | Linux | Kernel.

This error occurred on the drive using the hot swap cage.  I wonder if perhaps the circuitry on the cage is iffy.  The circuit board on that cage is about the simplest board that can be designed — it just maps wires from one pin connector to another — that’s it.

Perhaps the centos install is OK after all.  It’s intermittent which is bad.  Looks like it might pay to use higher quality hot swap cages.  Tomorrow I’ll try another brand and investigate this further.  Here’s another pertinent point.  I’m seeing this exact same error.

> 51/84:f8:47:dc:35/00:03:02:00:00/e0 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
> Jun 11 05:46:23 p34 kernel: [ 1445.288637] ata12.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
> Jun 11 05:46:23 p34 kernel: [ 1445.288639] ata12.00: error: { ICRC ABRT }

That’s your drive reporting that it saw transmission error on the wire.

VMWare memory allocation weirdness

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On a system with a lower amount of RAM you may find that ESXi allocates too much to run the vmkernel and system services not leaving sufficient memory for running VMs. In the below example, the host has 3 GB of memory. ESXi is showing about 2600 MB available for virtual machines. But an important number for virtual machines is the memory capacity shown on the Resource Allocation in the 2nd image below. This shows that my VMs have a total capacity of just over 1400 MB for VM memory overhead. A chart of memory overhead per vCPU / VM memory is shown below. VM memory overhead includes space for the VM frame buffer and virtualization data structures like shadow page tables. Once my running VMs have exhausted the 1400 MB of total capacity, I will not be able to start additional VMs even though ESXi may have plenty of free memory.

via VMWare memory allocation weirdness

Reassign a vswif to a new vmnic

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VMware doesn’t like having two service console connections with different IP addresses in the same subnet, so I have two options.

1.  Create a service console connection in a different subnet and access the host from that subnet using the VIclient.
2.  Enter the commands directly on the host console.

I recommend option two.  Keep in mind that this process temporarily disrupts network communications to the host via the service console IP.

After obtaining physical access to the host’s console (or network access via a DRAC or ILO), log in and su – to establish root.

via Reassign a vswif to a new vmnic « Layer3.

SIMPLE. Unable to network Vsphere in…

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SOLVED. I hope this saves someone some time. OK, in ESX non free Vsphere , Bridged networking does not work as in other VM’s. Rather than choosing standard bridged, you have to choose the vmnet0 from the bottom and not bridged. Now it works.

via VMware Communities: SIMPLE. Unable to network Vsphere in….

Arghhhhh!  Spent three hours on this…  This solution worked although I though I did have the VM originally set to vmnet0 when all the network connectivity weirdness began.