Ouch!

I was testing FT from VMware today, and it worked nicely. After I fixed my network adapter and used the VMXNET2 instead of VMXNET3 adapter to work with FT. I was able to failover a VM from one system to another.

That worked well and the VM never went down (in fact I was RDS’d into the VM and pinging out to different machines, and I never lost connection or anything). To instigate the failure, I simply powered off my Dell 2900 by pressing the power button.

Problem was, when I rebooted that machine, it wouldn’t boot. I got some weird panic that made no sense. It seemed like the HDD was corrupt or something, which is understandable since I pulled the power away from the machine. I had to reinstall the OS. I am not complaining, as my Domain Controller stayed up during the “failure”, but I had to reinstall ESX to get my systems back up.

So, how does VMware ESX Server handle the power being pulled from a machine where they are FT’ing a VM? After reinstalling, and just trying a shutdown –r now or shutdown –h now those allowed me to reboot the machine and showed off FT, so I will do that instead of pulling the power cord for now.