VMworld 2007 Top Support Issues Session

Some great information from vmware, I’m going to have to find a way to go next year…

My last session of Day 3, and of the entire conference, was a super-session on the top support issues and how to resolve them. For someone who wasn’t already familiar with some of the Service Console command-line utilities (such as esxcfg-vswitch, esxcfg-vmknic, esxcfg-vswif, etc.), this was a great session. For someone already pretty comfortable with these tools, the session was less helpful.

The session centered around six or seven top support issues:

Unable to connect to the Service Console

NICs in a bond are not in the same broadcast domain

Expanding a VMDK when there is an existing snapshot

Corrupt snapshot (.VMSD) file

Corrupt snapshot

Adding extents to VMFS volumes

Recovering a VMFS partition

Possible causes of problem #1 include deleting the vSwitch that houses the vswif. To fix the problem, you can probably just switch out NICs (and use esxcfg-nics to unassign and reassign NICs to the appropriate vSwitch), adjust VLAN properties (using the esxcfg-vswitch command to modify the port group), or recreate the vswif interface (using the esxcfg-vswif command). In some cases, it may be necessary to completely recreate the networking configuration. The process for completely rebuilding the networking configuration looks like this:

Use esxcfg-vswitch to delete all vSwitches

Create a new vSwitch using esxcfg-vswitch

Create a new port group for the Service Console (again, using esxcfg-vswitch)

Link a physical NIC to the vSwitch

Create a vswif interface (using esxcfg-vswif) and configure it with the correct IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway

Many Service Console issues relate to changing the Service Console configuration. It’s recommended to create a “backup” Service Console connection before modifying the primary connection, in case something doesn’t work as expected.

More at Source…….