No Network Access / Server 2003

Some recent update (which may be a group policy or MS update) has stopped two of our servers from seeing anything on the network.

Analysis of the event viewer shows it's an IPsec problem. Disable the service and reboot. It then works.

These servers will be moved to 2008R2 in due course. No idea of the underlying issue and no time or inclination to find out!

Migrating Clustered VMs Between Data Stores

If you've ever tried to migrate a VM that's got shared drives (generally a cluster member) between data stores, you'll have found that you can't!

You could move the files physically (which would work) but you would lose any thin provisioning.

So - shut down the server (since it's part of a cluster, that shouldn't be a problem). Now make a note of all of the shared drives, their location and the SCSI address they are connected to.

Remove them (but don't delete, obviously). Now you can migrate the machine to another data store and choose whether to thin provision or not.

Add them back in once that's done, making sure you match the SCSI IDs.

All done.

ESX Server Stuttering

We had a problem with ESX servers stuttering (seeming to freeze in VI centre then start again). The virtual machines on that server would do the same, but the ESX console would work fine via puTTY.

This appears to be storage connected. If you make a storage change and this happens, run the following on the service console:

esxcfg-rescan vmhba1
esxcfg-rescan vmhba2
vimsh -ne 'hostsvc/storage/refresh'

This should sort the problem (it might take a few mins to complete)