As you know from my previous post, I just added a new blade to my environment. But everything was not as clean as I desired. For some reason when I went to move a existing node from one vSphere Cluster to another, vCenter crashed. I thought it was the state in which I left the node, but alas it was not. So what would make vCenter Crash, VMware Update Manager stop showing up as a plugin, and other management tools suddenly stop working, when they worked fine before?It really did not take a lot of effort to find the culprit, but I was surprised that none of the management tools actually told me outright the problem.
Which was that the database server I was using had a full drive.
None of my current management tools actually told me this, instead they went on running like everything was fine, when clearly it was not. So which tools did not show this information? VMware vCops Advanced, Solarwinds VMAN, and vKernel to mention just a few. But they do show issues with other nodes that had full disks, so I wonder what is so special about a Windows 2008 R2 Server running MSSQL?
This is the type of Alert I would expect to be emailed to me from all these tools. Yet, no email was sent.
The solution was simple, free up and add disk space to the VM. I removed from MSSQL a few old and unused databases, which gave me just enough breathing room to maintain my systems. The next step was to add more disk space. I did this by expanding the virtual disk and adding space to it using the build in Windows 2008 disk extend capability.
Now to find out why the tools did not report this accurately or even email me when this happened. Perhaps because the server was full and no writes could take place? Which means the tools need to change for such critical issues?
Edward L. Haletky, aka Texiwill, is an author, analyst, developer, technologist, and business owner. Edward owns AstroArch Consulting, Inc., providing virtualization, security, network consulting and development and TVP Strategy where he is also an Analyst. Edward is the Moderator and Host of the Virtualization Security Podcast as well as a guru and moderator for the VMware Communities Forums, providing answers to security and configuration questions. Edward is working on new books on Virtualization.