[CentOS] Journal Aborts in VMware ESX (Filesystem Corruption)

[Kwan Lowe]

>> It's certainly possible that the error I was receiving was a different
>> reason, though similar symptoms. We started seeing filesystems go
>> read-only, and only rebooting would clear it up.
>
> I use that setting on the "Host OS" for VMWare to prevent a whole vm
> from getting killed.
>
> That setting will maintain a minimum amount of free memory available to
> prevent a large program that requests memory quick from depleting all
> available memory and causing the program killer from killing the highest
> RAM process.
>
> If you are on a Host OS box, the biggest Memory processes are your VMs,
> and getting one killed off because memory reaches zero is not good.
>
> I don't have any idea how it would fix journal errors on a drive, but I
> guess it could.
>

It's been a few years since I put in the tuning, but here's some info
that might be useful:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/20690?start=0&tstart=0

In particular, others had reported seeing this error:

"kernel: journal_get_undo_access: No memory for committed data".

I don't recall that error in my case, but might explain why the tuning
fixed the problem. There's a bugzilla for this:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=179605