This morning I get a call that a server is down. The server in question is a vmware guest, windows 2003 advanced. The host is vmware server 1.01, running on centos 4.4 x64 on a poweredge 2950. The server has 16g of ram and a quadcore cpu, storage is provided by a perc 5/i, raid 1 across two 146gb sas drives.

I was able to ssh into the host. After trying to ping the guest, and trying to connect to vmware via the management console, I decided to restart the vmware service. so I type service vmware restart. it hung on "shutting down virtual machines". I was able to ctrl-c out, and decided to manually kill the vmware processes. after killing all the vmware stuff, I did a service vmware start. I get an error "cannot touch /etc/vmware/locations: read only file system"

/etc is part of /, which mount claimed was mounted RW

so I try cat /var/log/messages and get nothing

so I tell the machine to reboot (remotely). of course, it doesn't come back up on its own, so I drive to the location. the machine is running, but sitting at a black screen. I don't know what state it was in, so did a forced turn off. turning it back on, it proceeded to boot normally. it had a slight pause while it ran fsck on / but other than that, no errors.

the vm's restarted normally, /var/log/messages is back, but has no entries between June 15 and when I rebooted it the 2nd time on June 18.

any ideas on where I should start looking?

is there some way to read array status from a Perc controller under linux?

any suggestions will be appreciated!

thanks Gordon