Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash

[Joe Greco]

> On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:27:31 -0500, Joe Greco <jgreco at ns.sol.net> wrote:
> 
> > It also doesn't explain the experience here, where one VM basically
> > crapped out but only after a migration - and then stayed crapped out.
> > It would be interesting to hear about your datastore, how busy it is,
> > what technology, whether you're using thin, etc.  I just have this real
> > strong feeling that it's some sort of corruption with the vmfs3 and thin
> > provisioned disk format, but it'd be interesting to know if that's
> > totally off-track.
> 
> We've ruled out SAN, but we haven't ruled out VMFS. Even FreeBSD Guests on  
> standalone ESXi servers with no SAN exhibit this crash.
>
> For the record, we only use thick provisioning and if it was corruption  
> I'm not sure what layer the corruption could be at. The crashy servers  
> show no abnormalities when I run either `freebsd-update IPS` or  
> `pkg_libchk` to confirm checksums of all installed programs. Now the other  
> data on there... it's not exactly verified, but our backups via rsnapshot  
> seem to prove there is no issue there or we'd have lots of new files each  
> run.

Crud, there goes part of my theory :-)

Have you migrated these hosts, or were they installed in-place and
never moved?

fwiw the apparent integrity of things on the VM is consistent with
our experience too.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
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