I'm undergoing the conversion of moving two host machines (RHEL5 64) running VMWare Server 2 to ESXi.
I'm trying to backup the VMs from one of the hosts to the other. I took a snapshot of a 32bit windows 2003 guest VM, scp'd the entire /var/lib/vmware/Virtual\ Machines/guestOS/ folder to the other machine.
The problem occured when I tried to start the machine on the new host. I keep receiving the following error on startup:
Message from localhost.localdomain: It appears that other virtual machines are running. Some host devices may be unavailable to this virtual machine. Some host devices (such as CD-ROM drives) may be
shared among several virtual machines by toggling the entries in the
"VM > Removable Devices" menu. Select OK to continue, Cancel to
power off.
Message from localhost.localdomain: This virtual machine may have
been moved or copied. In order to configure certain management and
networking features VMware Server needs to know which. Did you move
this virtual machine, or did you copy it? If you don't know, answer "I
copied it".
Message from localhost.localdomain: VMware Server
unrecoverable error: (vmx) Unexpected signal: 6. A log file is
available in "/var/lib/vmware/Virtual
Machines/GIS_SDE1-2003/vmware.log". Please request support and include
the contents of the log file. To collect data to submit to VMware
support, select Help > About and click "Collect Support Data". You
can also run the "vm-support" script in the Workstation folder
directly. We will respond on the basis of your support entitlement.
Message
from localhost.localdomain: VMware Server unrecoverable error:
(Worker#15) Unexpected signal: 11. A log file is available in
"/var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/GIS_SDE1-2003/vmware.log". Please
request support and include the contents of the log file. To collect
data to submit to VMware support, select Help > About and click
"Collect Support Data". You can also run the "vm-support" script in the
Workstation folder directly. We will respond on the basis of your
support entitlement.
I've been searching for an answer and found a simple solution to create a new VM with the same disk in the folder. I was able to create the VM what appeared successfully, but lead to an unexpected signal 6:
Message
from localhost.localdomain: VMware Server unrecoverable error: (vmx)
Unexpected signal: 6. A log file is available in
"/var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/GIS_SDE2-2003/vmware.log". Please
request support and include the contents of the log file. To collect
data to submit to VMware support, select Help > About and click
"Collect Support Data". You can also run the "vm-support" script in the
Workstation folder directly. We will respond on the basis of your
support entitlement.
Browsing some more, I found another thread in the archive saying I might need libgcc41-32bit on the host machines, since it's a 64bit box, but doing a yum list libgcc shows:
libgcc.i386 4.1.2-46.el5 installed
libgcc.x86_64 4.1.2-46.el5 installed
I also saw another thread that the proper services might not be up, but those are all working just fine, as I'm doing / receiving these errors through the web portal, and other guest VMs are still running.
I would attach the logs files, but they're both ~9mbs tgz. I do have logs of the following: one of the VM in it's original form (same config, same disk) on the new Host OS (explained above). But the other log file is of the original Host OS and the copied Guest VM. For some reason, the guest VM I snapshotted, shutdown, and copied from the folder, won't restart! It's receiving an Unexpected Signal 11 and won't start up now (meaning I'm currently in a state without this machine!)
I know both of these errors said to use the support tools, but since VMWare Server isn't officially supported, I'm posting it here. I may be posting this under my new ESXi Liscense as well.
Thanks!