[CentOS] CentOS 5.8 crash/freeze running VMware

Michael Eager

eager at eagerm.com
Fri Jun 29 14:52:01 UTC 2012


On 06/28/2012 06:33 PM, Ted Miller wrote:
> On 06/28/2012 12:45 PM, Michael Eager wrote:
>> Hi --
>>
>> I have a server running CentOS 5.8.  It has a 6-core AMD processor,
>> 16Gb memory, and a RAID 5 file system.  It serves as both a file server
>> and to run several VMware virtual machines.  The guest machines run
>> Windows 7 and various versions of Linux.
>>
>> The system is running the latest version of VMware Workstation.
>> Until recently, I started VMs using the VMware Workstation GUI.
>> The system has been very stable and seldom crashes.
>>
>> Recently, I set up an init script to start several VMs at boot
>> time using the vmrun command.  This appeared to work correctly,
>> but the system has become unstable, freezing at various times.
>> When the system freezes, there is no console response and it
>> does not respond to a ping.  There is nothing in syslog to
>> indicate any error.
>>
>> The script started 8 VMs.  I've cut back to now running 4 VMs
>> and the system appears stable.
>>
>> Is there some relation between the number of cores and the number
>> of VMs one can run?
>>
>> Is there something else which might cause the system to crash
>> when running multiple VMs?
>>
>> Any suggestions to identify why the system crashed?
>>
> Are you staggering the startups of the VMs?  The server may be choking
> trying to boot 8 machines at once.  I suggest starting a VM every 30-60
> seconds, so that you aren't trying to boot all 8 at once.  Don't know if it
> will help, but it might.

The crashs happen long after boot time when all of the VMs are running.

(Actually, startup goes very smoothly, with the VMs starting in parallel
in the background while system boot completes.)


-- 
Michael Eager	 eager at eagercon.com
1960 Park Blvd., Palo Alto, CA 94306  650-325-8077



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