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Archive for vMotion

No Guest OS Heartbeats are being received error when vMotioning

August 28, 2012 vMotion, VMware 3 comments

I encountered this error post a change to update our VMware Hosts to the latest update.

When trying to vMotion a virtual machine (VM), VMware vCenter may incorrectly report “No guest OS heartbeats are being received” error even when the VMware Tools service is correctly installed and is running on the guest VM. This is what the error looks like:

If you search the VMware knowledge base they will tell you:

Ensure that the VMware Tools are installed in the virtual machine before performing a migration
Ensure that the virtual machine has been running long enough for the operating system to be completely started before performing a migration
If VMware Tools are already installed, reinstall the VMware Tools to ensure that you are on the latest version and that there is no corruption in the configuration

However if VMware Tools is up and running when checking the vCenter and the VM, that’s all very well, but there’s also another possible cause … if you restart your vCenter server it can also trigger this behaviour! There are two ways to fix this

In your vSphere Client which is connected to your vCenter server, just open a Console window to the VM and then immediately close it again. You don’t even need to login to the VM!
Another way to correct this is to STOP and then RESTART the VMware Tools Service process on the VM.

vMotion and NIC Teaming

May 16, 2012 vMotion, VMware No comments

vSphere 4 vMotion and NIC Teaming

In vSphere4 you can have only one VMkernel port for vMotion, so for network balance you have to use IP hash with Etherchannel
In vSphere 5 you can have multiple VMkernel so you can balance vMotion traffic across all NICs without any extra configuration on physical switch.

vSphere 5 vMotion and NIC Teaming

Among the many new networking features introduced in vSphere 5, perhaps one of the more significant improvements is multi-NIC support for vMotion. This new enhancement will allow vSphere 5 to leverage multiple network adapters (in parallel) for a vMotion operation. Previous releases, including vSphere 4.0 and 4.1, limited vMotion iterations to the bandwidth of a single network adapter. Multi-NIC vMotion does not require any physical port configurations or load balancing option

Supported number of adapters for vMotion in vSphere 5 (per host):

1GbE – 16 NICs
10GbE – 4 NICs

Concurrent vMotions in vSphere 5 (per host):

1GbE – 4 vMotion operations
10GbE – 8 vMotion operations

Configuration

You will need to bind each VMkernel Interface (vmknic) to a physical NIC.

Create a VMkernel Interface and give it the name “vMotion-01″
Go to the settings of this Portgroup and configure 1 physical NIC-port as active and all others as “standby” (see the screenshot below for an example)
Create a second VMkernel Interface and give it the name “vMotion-02″
Go to the settings of this Portgroup and configure a different NIC-port as active and all others as “standby

When you will initiate a vMotion multiple NIC ports can be used. Keep in mind that even when you vMotion just 1 virtual machine both links will be used. Also, if you don’t have dedicated links for vMotion you might want to consider using Network I/O Control. vMotion can saturate a link and at least when you’ve set up Network I/O Control and assigned the right amount of shares each type of traffic will get what it has been assigned.