Here is the situation. Had a blade chassis running 7 instances of ESX 3.0 panic and crash at the same time. Now I am a virtualization advocate. Been in the VMware world for the last couple of years.
So we sent dump logs, SAN logs, etc.. to vmware to parse and tell us what happened. Took two weeks but this was the reply "The root cause of the crashes on systems Host4, 6, and 7 were due to a problem with the vmkernel that's caused by hardware checksumming and seems to only be hit when the guest is sending out or receiving 802.3 packets. What application is doing this? The workaround for this......"
Now, 802.3 to me is ethernet. Basic wiki type understanding of it. Family of protocols, ranging from 10base2 to GigE. I'm a windows sysadmin so I have no pride factor here. I just need to understand what happened and the blurb above didn't do it for me. So I wrote back. Could you elaborate, my understanding is 802.3 is CSMA/CD, ethernet standard. Help me understand what you wrote, etc....
So the response "Actually, the most common Ethernet protocol is DIX. 802.3 is more obscure"
This of course, did not help me at all and frankly I feel like the guy was tweaking me because he thought I was questioning him. Well it took the guy two weeks but I wasn't. I was just trying to digest.
Anyway, what I am looking for is, based on his emails and responses, some clarification. The VM's are all windows boxes. For reference, right before this event, ALOT of print server VM's were created with IBM LLC2 installed as a protocol. All Server 2003 machines that I suspect is the culprit, but I would like to get my mind around why they are, IF they are. Make sense?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
So we sent dump logs, SAN logs, etc.. to vmware to parse and tell us what happened. Took two weeks but this was the reply "The root cause of the crashes on systems Host4, 6, and 7 were due to a problem with the vmkernel that's caused by hardware checksumming and seems to only be hit when the guest is sending out or receiving 802.3 packets. What application is doing this? The workaround for this......"
Now, 802.3 to me is ethernet. Basic wiki type understanding of it. Family of protocols, ranging from 10base2 to GigE. I'm a windows sysadmin so I have no pride factor here. I just need to understand what happened and the blurb above didn't do it for me. So I wrote back. Could you elaborate, my understanding is 802.3 is CSMA/CD, ethernet standard. Help me understand what you wrote, etc....
So the response "Actually, the most common Ethernet protocol is DIX. 802.3 is more obscure"
This of course, did not help me at all and frankly I feel like the guy was tweaking me because he thought I was questioning him. Well it took the guy two weeks but I wasn't. I was just trying to digest.
Anyway, what I am looking for is, based on his emails and responses, some clarification. The VM's are all windows boxes. For reference, right before this event, ALOT of print server VM's were created with IBM LLC2 installed as a protocol. All Server 2003 machines that I suspect is the culprit, but I would like to get my mind around why they are, IF they are. Make sense?
Any help is greatly appreciated.