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November 6, 2009

Thin Provisioning strategy with VMware

Filed under: Storage,Virtualization — Tags: , , , — Nate @ 3:44 pm

Since the announcement of thin provisioning built into vSphere I have seen quite a few blog posts on how to take advantage of it but haven’t seen anything that matches my strategy which has served me well utilizing array-based thin provisioning technology. I think it’s pretty foolproof..

The man caveat is that I assume you have a decent amount of storage available on your system, that is your VMFS volumes aren’t the only thing residing on your storage. On my current storage array,written VMFS data accounts for maybe 2-3 % of my storage. On the storage array I had at my last company it was probably 10-15%. I don’t believe in dedicated storage arrays myself. I prefer nice shared storage systems that can sustain random and sequential I/O from any number of hosts and distributed that I/O across all of the resources for maximum efficiency.  So my current array has most of it’s space set aside for a NFS cluster, and then there is a couple dozen terabytes set aside for SQL servers and VMware. The main key is being able to share the same spindles across dozens or even hundreds of LUNs.

There has been a lot of debate over the recent years about how best to size your VMFS volumes. The most recent data I have seen suggests somewhere between 250GB and 500GB. There seems to be unanimous opinion out there not to do something crazy and use 2TB volumes. The exact size depends on your setup. How many VMs, how many hosts, how often you use snapshots, how often you do vMotion, as well as the amount of I/O that goes on. The less of all of those the larger the volume can potentially be.

My method is so simple. I chose 1TB as my volume sizes, thin provisioned of course.  I utilize the default lazy zero VMFS mode and do not explicitly turn on thin provisioning on any VMDK files. There’s no real point if you already have it in the array. So I create 1TB volumes, and I begin creating VMs on them. I try to stop when I get to around 500GB of allocated(but not written) space. That is VMware thinks it is using 500GB, but it may only be using 30GB. This way I know, the system will never use more than 500GB. Pretty simple. Of course I have enough space in reserve that if something crazy were to happen the volume could grow to 500GB and not cause any problems. Even with my current storage array operating in the neighborhood of 89% of total capacity, that still leaves me with several terabytes of space I can use in an emergency.

If I so desire I can go beyond the 500GB at any time without an issue. If I chose not to then I haven’t wasted any space because nothing is written to those blocks. My thin provisioning system is licensed based on written data, so if I have 10TB of thin provisioning on my system I can, if I want create 100TB of thin provisioned volumes, provided I don’t write more than 10TB to them. So you see there really is no loss in making a larger volume when the data is thin provisioned on the array. Why not make it 2TB or even bigger? Well really I can’t see a time when I would EVER want a 2TB VMFS volume which is why I picked 1TB.

I took the time in my early days working with thin provisioning to learn the growth trends of various applications and how best to utilize them to get maximum gain out of thin provisioning.  With VMs that means having a small dedicated disk for OS and swap, and any data resides on other VMDKs or preferably on a NAS or for databases on raw devices(for snapshot purposes). Given that core OSs don’t grow much there isn’t much space needed(I default to 8GB) for the OS, and I give the OS a 1GB swap partition.  For additional VMDKs or raw devices I always use LVM. I use it to assist me in automatically detecting what devices a particular volume are on, I use it for naming purposes, and I use it to forcefully contain growth. Some applications are not thin provisioning friendly but I’d like to be able to expand the volume on demand without an outage. Online LVM resize and file system resize allows this without touching the array. It really doesn’t take much work.

On my systems I don’t really do vMotion(not licensed), I very rarely use VMFS snapshots(few times a year), the I/O on my VMFS volumes is tiny despite having 300+ VMs running on them. So in theory I probably could get away with 1TB or even 2TB VMFS volume sizes, but why lock myself into that if I don’t have to? So I don’t.

I also use dedicated swap VMFS volumes so I can monitor the amount of I/O going on with swap from an array perspective. Currently I have 21 VMware hosts connected to our array totalling 168 CPU cores, and 795GB of memory. Working to retire our main production VMware hosts, many of which are several years old(re-purposed from other applications). Now that I’ve proven how well it can work on existing hardware and the low cost version the company is ready to gear up a bit more and commit more resources to a more formalized deployment utilizing the latest hardware and software technology. You won’t catch me using the enterprise plus or even the enterprise version of VMware though, cost/ benefit isn’t there.

November 3, 2009

The new Cisco/EMC/Vmware alliance – the vBlock

Filed under: Storage,Virtualization — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nate @ 6:04 pm

Details were released a short time ago thanks to The Register on the vBlock systems coming from the new alliance of Cisco and EMC, who dragged along Vmware(kicking and screaming I’m sure). The basic gist of it is to be able to order a vBlock and have it be a completely integrated set of infrastructure ready to go, servers and networking from Cisco, storage from EMC, and Hypervisor from VMware.

vBlock0 consists of rack mount servers from Cisco, and unknown EMC storage, price not determined yet

vBlock1 consists 16-32 blade servers from Cisco and EMC CX4-480 storage system. Price ranges from $1M – 2.8M

vBlock2 consists of 32-64 blade servers from Cisco and an EMC V-MAX. Starting price $6M.

Sort of like FCoE, sounds nice in concept but the details fall flat on their face.

First off is the lack of choice. That is Cisco’s blades are based entirely on the Xeon 5500s, which are, you guessed it limited to two sockets. And at least at the moment limited to four cores. I haven’t seen word yet on compatibility with the upcoming 8-core cpus if they are socket/chip set compatible with existing systems or not(if so, wonderful for them..). Myself I prefer more raw cores, and AMD is the one that has them today(Istanbul with 6 cores, Q1 2010 with 12 cores). But maybe not everyone wants that so it’s nice to have choice. In my view HP blades win out here for having the broadest selection of offerings from both Intel and AMD. Combine that with their dense memory capacity(16 or 18 DIMM slots on a half height blade), allows you up to 1TB of memory in a blade chassis in an afforadable confiugration using 4GB DIMMs. Yes Cisco has their memory extender technology but again IMO at least with a dual socket Xeon 5500 that it is linked to the CPU core:memory density is way outta whack. It may make more sense when we have 16, 24, or even 32 cores on a system using this technology. I’m sure there are niche applications that can take advantage of it on a dual socket/quad core configuration, but the current Xeon 5500 is really holding them back with this technology.

Networking, it’s all FCoE based, I’ve already written a blog entry on that, you can read about my thoughts on FCoE here.

Storage, you can see how even with the V-MAX EMC hasn’t been able to come up with a storage system that can start on the smaller end of the scale, something that is not insanely unaffordable to 90%+ of the organizations out there. So on the more affordable end they offer you a CX4. If you are an organization that is growing you may find yourself outliving this array pretty quickly. You can add another vBlock, or you can rip and replace it with a V-MAX which will scale much better, but of course the entry level pricing for such a system makes it unsuitable for almost everyone to try to start out with even on the low end.

I am biased towards 3PAR of course as both of the readers of the blog know, so do yourself a favor and check out their F and T series systems, if you really think you want to scale high go for a 2-node T800, the price isn’t that huge, the only difference between a T400 and a T800 is the backplane. They use “blocks” to some extent, blocks being controllers(in pairs, up to four pairs), disk chassis(40 disks per chassis, up to 8 per controller pair I think). Certainly you can’t go on forever, or can you? If you don’t imagine you will scale to really massive levels go for a T400 or even a F400.  In all cases you can start out with only two controllers the additional cost to give you the option of an online upgrade to four controllers is really trivial, and offers nice peace of mind. You can even go from a T400 to a T800 if you wanted, just need to switch out the back plane (downtime involved). The parts are the same! the OS is the same! How much does it cost? Not as much as you would expect. When 3PAR announced their first generation 8-node system 7 years ago, entry level price started at $100k. You also get nice things like their thin built in technology which will allow you to run those eager zeroed VMs for fault tolerance and not consume any disk space or I/O for the zeros. You can also get multi level synchronous/asynchronous replication for a fraction of the cost of others. I could go on all day but you get the idea. There are so many fiber ports on the 3PAR arrays that you don’t need a big SAN infrastructure just hook your blade enclosures directly to the array.

And as for networking hook your 10GbE Virtual Connect switches on your c Class enclosures to your existing infrastructure. I am hoping/expecting HP to support 10GbaseT soon, and drop the CX4 passive copper cabling. The Extreme Networks Summit X650 stands alone as the best 1U 10GbE (10GbaseT or SFP+) switch on the market. Whether it is line rate, or full layer 3, or high speed stacking, or lower power consuming 10GbaseT vs fiber optics,  or advanced layer 3 networking protocols to simplify management,  price and ease of use — nobody else comes close. If you want bigger check out the Black Diamond 8900 series.

Second you can see with their designs that after the first block or two the whole idea of a vBlock sort of falls apart. That is pretty quickly your likely to just be adding more blades(especially if you have a V-MAX), rather than adding more storage and more blades.

Third you get the sense that these aren’t really blocks at all. The first tier is composed of rack mount systems, the second tier is blade systems with CX4, the third tier is blade systems with V-MAX. Each tier has something unique which hardly makes it a solution you can build as a “block” as you might expect from something called a vBlock. Given the prices here I am honestly shocked that the first tier is using rack mount systems. Blade chassis do not cost much, I would of expected them to simply use a blade chassis with just one or two blades in it. Really shows that they didn’t spend much time thinking about this.

I suppose if you treated these as blocks in their strictest sense and said yes we won’t add more than 64 blades to a V-MAX, and add it like that you could get true blocks, but I can imagine the amount of waste doing something like that is astronomical.

I didn’t touch on Vmware at all, I think their solution is solid, and they have quite a bit of choices. I’m certain with this vBlock they will pimp the enterprise plus version of software, but I really don’t see a big advantage of that version with such a small number of physical systems(a good chunk of the reason to go to that is improved management with things like host profiles and distributed switches). As another blogger recently noted, Vmware has everything to lose out of this alliance, I’m sure they have been fighting hard to maintain their independence and openness, this reeks of the opposite, they will have to stay on their toes for a while when dealing with their other partners like HP, IBM, NetApp, and others..

October 6, 2009

Dell+Ivoxy Happy Hour on Oct 29

Filed under: Events — Nate @ 10:21 am

Dell is at it again, this time with Ivoxy on October 29th in Bellevue’s Parlor Billards. They look to be focusing on Equallogic storage. I was at another event with Ivoxy and Equallogic at the very same venue about a year or two ago when they were partnered up, they both seemed pretty happy to be partners. Then Ivoxy ran into NetApp’s arms and have been in love with them ever since.  So I think it’s kinda strange deja vu for them to have this sort of event focused on Equallogic storage. I suppose there are use cases where they might recommend Equallogic over NetApp but it certainly seems that Ivoxy is a NetApp shop.

If your interested you can register here. If it was earlier in the day I’d probably go..

October 2, 2009

Cleaning the VMCC (3.5) Database

Filed under: Uncategorized — @ 10:45 am

Last weekend encountered a problem with our VMware instance where we could no longer reach a few of our VM’s via SSH. No big deal I thought I will just connect to VMCC and jump on the console. So I was mildly annoyed when I couldn’t connect, but it was Sunday and there was nothing Product impacted so decide to investigate first thing Monday.

By the time I got in Monday a co-work had already begun investigating why we couldn’t connect to VMCC and found the error ‘VIM_VCDB’ because the ‘PRIMARY’ filegroup is full. in Event log for the machine hosting VMCC. A little googling gave some pointers to the fix, but most seemed to assume you were a MS SQL DBA and knew what you were doing. Since I am not a MS SQL DBA and did not know what I am doing, I thought I would put what I eventually figured out here in case any other non-DBA’s had the same problem. (Note you could completely destroy your VMware installation following these instructions, I would highly recommend you hire an expert to do it)

1.) Download the purge old data SQL script from HERE

2.) If you don’t already have it (not being a DBA and all) download SSMSE from HERE

3.) Double- Click the VCDB_table_cleanup_MSSQL script and it will Launch SSMSE
sqlserver-connect

4.) Select the VIM_VCDB database from the drop down
SSMSE-screenshot

5.) Now click the SSMSE-execute-button button to perform a trail run. You should see something similar to the screen below showing the output of the test run.

cleanup-complete

From here I will leave as an exercise for the reader to figure out how to enable the cleanup script to actually clean up the database, Hint: read the script comments.

Dell+VMware Luncheon Oct 15

Filed under: Events — Nate @ 9:23 am

Speaking of free food..I mean excuses not to go to work, I mean informative conferences there is another on October 15 in Bellevue hosted by Dell and VMware, details here.

October 1, 2009

VMware ThinApp demo luncheon Oct 15

Filed under: Events — Nate @ 8:57 pm

Hey, while I’m here I might as well tell you about another local tech event, this one on the east side. Ivoxy and VMware are having a luncheon in Kirkland to talk about ThinApp. I don’t expect to be there but give the Ivoxy team very high marks for VMware knowledge. Check it out here. And check out Ivoxy here.

Splunk Live Seattle Oct 22

Filed under: Events — Nate @ 8:55 pm

Hey, both of you reading this blog should come to Splunk Live in Seattle on Oct 22. Sign up here. Good excuse to get out and about. I just finished 3 days of online splunk classes. It’s a pretty powerful app, I’m going to need all the help I can get to use it to it’s full potential.

September 29, 2009

Simple Network management

Filed under: Networking — Tags: — Nate @ 7:02 pm

I have honed my skills on a wide variety of areas over the past fifteen years. Networking is one area where I have spent a lot of time in in the last 6 years or so, specifically layer 3 networks. I have designed three networks to date, the first was the biggest, nearly 3,000 GbE ports, the more recent two were significantly smaller, combined probably 900 ports, most being GbE.

For layer 3 switching environments my vendor of choice is Extreme Networks. I like them for many reasons(as the others on this blog can testify I could go on all afternoon about them), but one of them is ease of use, and I wanted to illustrate this concept which seems to elude so many enterprise networking vendors out there.

In this case I will pick on Juniper, because I have been talking with them as well about replacing our aging Cisco infrastructure with something better. Though the whole network refresh idea was prompted by very poor quality Dell PowerConnect 6448 switches.

But back on topic, I use Juniper here because most people probably know Cisco, not as many are familiar with how Juniper does things. I am not trying to knock their complexity specifically, this is a more generic complaint that I am using them to illustrate.

So I asked a network engineer who is very good at Juniper’s JunOS product to tell me what commands are needed for two very simple, yet common tasks, using their EX4200 stacking switch as the platform of choice.

Task 1

Create an 802.3ad port grouping with the first four ports on a switch which uses layer 3 (optionally layer 4) information for load balancing

Juniper JunOS Commands (17 commands)

set chassis aggregated-devices ethernet device-count 1
del interfaces ge-0/0/1 unit 0
del interfaces ge-0/0/2 unit 0
del interfaces ge-0/0/3 unit 0
del interfaces ge-0/0/4 unit 0
set interfaces ge-0/0/1 ether-options 802.3ad ae0
set interfaces ge-0/0/2 ether-options 802.3ad ae0
set interfaces ge-0/0/3 ether-options 802.3ad ae0
set interfaces ge-0/0/4 ether-options 802.3ad ae0
set interfaces ae0 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ae0 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members all
set interfaces ae0 unit 0 family ethernet-switching native-vlan-id 1
set interfaces ae0 aggregated-ether-options lacp active ( if lacp is desired )

Extreme XOS Commands (1 command)

enable sharing 1 grouping 1-4 algorithm address-based L3_L4


Task 2

TASK: Create two VLANs with the following properties and enable layer 3 routing between them:

VLAN 1: IP: 10.200.50.1/24 TAG: 1250 Ports: Tagged: 1,2,3,4,6,8,10,11,12,13,29,30,32,33 Untagged: 35,36

VLAN 2: IP: 10.200.51.1/24 TAG: 1251 Ports: Tagged: 1,2,3,4,6,8,10,11,12,13,29,30,32,33 Untagged: 37,38

Juniper JunOS Commands (54 commands)

set vlans vlan1 description “First VLAN”
set vlans vlan1 vlan-id 1250
set vlans vlan1 l3-interface vlan.1250
set interfaces vlan unit 1250 family inet address 10.200.50.1/24
set vlans vlan2 description “Second VLAN”
set vlans vlan2 vlan-id 1251
set vlans vlan2 l3-interface vlan.1251
set interfaces vlan unit 1251 family inet address 10.200.51.1/24
set interfaces ge-0/0/1 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ge-0/0/1 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/1 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/2 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ge-0/0/2 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/2 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/3 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ge-0/0/3 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/3 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/4 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ge-0/0/4 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/4 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/6 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ge-0/0/6 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/6 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/8 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ge-0/0/8 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/8 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/10 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ge-0/0/10 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/10 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/11 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ge-0/0/11 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/11 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/12 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ge-0/0/12 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/12 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/13 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ge-0/0/13 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/13 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/29 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ge-0/0/29 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/29 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/30 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ge-0/0/30 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/30 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/32 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ge-0/0/32 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/32 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/33 unit 0 family ethernet-switching port-mode trunk
set interfaces ge-0/0/33 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/33 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/35 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/36 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1250
set interfaces ge-0/0/37 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251
set interfaces ge-0/0/38 unit 0 family ethernet-switching vlan members 1251

Extreme XOS Commands (12 commands)

   create vlan test1
   config test1 tag 1250
   config test1 ipaddress 10.200.50.1/24
   config test1 add ports 1,6,8,10-13,29,30,32,33 tagged
   config test1 add ports 35-36
   enable ipforwarding test1

   create vlan test2
   config test2 tag 1251
   config test2 ipaddress 10.200.51.1/24
   config test2 add ports 1,6,8,10-13,29,30,32,33 tagged
   config test2 add ports 35-36
   enable ipforwarding test2

You can see in the case with the XOS commands that for the most part you can get an idea what the commands do, even if you don’t know much about networking, not so with JunOS (in my opinion), same applies to IOS.

Extreme switches allow me to do other things than focus on the network, they work great, they are really easy to manage, fast as can be, and lower cost than the competition. Faster, better, cheaper, usually your only supposed to
be able to pick two out of three. I’ve been using them in production for the better part of the last decade, from the Summit 48, 48si, Summit 400, Summit X450A/E, and the Black Diamond 10808.

As illustrated here, network management doesn’t have to be all that complicated. In the future I will try to give an overview of other technologies I have used to make things simpler such as ESRP which is my favorite network protocol, can you imagine adding full layer 3 protection to a VLAN with only a single command?

September 14, 2009

transcode tips

Filed under: Uncategorized — Nate @ 6:58 pm

I downloaded a show off my Tivo Series 3 last night, and wanted to convert it from it’s native MPEG-2 to MPEG-4. I’ve done it before, but didn’t want to spend time trying to find the scripts so I spent a bunch of time searching around for some quick tips on how best to do it. And despite some honest efforts I came up with nothing useful.

So a short time ago I dug up my scripts and thought to share some of them, not only will it make it easier for me since I can check this site for the syntax in the future but maybe it’ll help you too.

Of course I won’t cover installing transcode or it’s dependencies, I assume you have all of that done. I don’t recall what all of the options do but as you can see there are quite a few, not the easiest thing to remember. See the man page or transcode documentation for what the options mean.

Export audio portion of a video file to OGG Vorbis:

transcode -i input_filename -y raw,ogg -F mpeg4 -E44100 -b 128 -N 0x55 -w 120,300,2 -V -Z 176×120 -m filename.ogg -o /dev/null

Export audio portion of a file to MP3(using lame):

transcode -i input_file -y raw -F mpeg4 -E44100 -b 128 -N 0x55 -w 120,300,2 -V -Z 176×120 -m output.mp3 -o /dev/null

Convert video+audio from some format(e.g. MPEG-2) to MPEG-4:

transcode -i input.mpg y xvid4 -F mpeg4 -E22050 -b 64 -N 0x55 –w 250,200,3 -V -M 2 -o filename.avi

I wish transcode had some easy to use templates, such as convert with low, medium, or high compression type of deal. I mean if you don’t specify any options by default it seems to use maximum quality and in some cases despite going from say MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 I’ve seen the file size increase.

Fix hanging vmware tools on linux

Filed under: Virtualization — Tags: , — Nate @ 5:48 pm

I can’t be the only one who has come across this, back in early June I filed a support case with VMware around the fact that roughly 90% of the time when the latest version of vmware-tools that shipped with vSphere loaded on my CentOS 5 systems it would hang part way through, if I logged into the console I and just pressed <enter> it would continue loading. Naturally the Tier 1 support rep was fairly useless, wanting me to do some stupid things to get more debug information.

I went off on my own and traced down the problem to the vmware-config-tools.pl script towards the end of the script at around line 11,600, where it tries to make a symlink. If I disable the offending code the problem stops(the link it’s trying to create is in fact already there):

sub symlink_icudt38l {
my $libdir = db_get_answer('LIBDIR');
install_symlink($libdir . '/icu', $gRegistryDir . '/icu');
}

If your interested in the strace output:

[..]
[pid  7228] <... read resumed> "", 4096) = 0
[pid  7228] --- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---
[pid  7228] fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFIFO|0600, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
[pid  7228] close(4)                    = 0
[pid  7228] rt_sigaction(SIGHUP, {SIG_IGN}, {SIG_IGN}, 8) = 0
[pid  7228] rt_sigaction(SIGINT, {SIG_IGN}, {SIG_DFL}, 8) =  0
[pid  7228] rt_sigaction(SIGQUIT, {SIG_IGN},  {SIG_DFL}, 8) = 0
[pid  7228] wait4(7244, [{WIFEXITED(s)  && WEXITSTATUS(s) == 0}], 0, NULL) = 7244
[pid   7228] rt_sigaction(SIGHUP, {SIG_IGN}, NULL, 8) = 0
[pid   7228] rt_sigaction(SIGINT, {SIG_DFL}, NULL, 8) = 0
[pid   7228] rt_sigaction(SIGQUIT, {SIG_DFL}, NULL, 8) = 0
[pid  7228] lstat("/etc/vmware-tools/icu", {st_mode=S_IFLNK|0777,  st_size=25, ...}) = 0
[pid  7228] read(0,

The last line there the system is waiting for input, when I hit <enter> it continues loading.

The support case sat..and sat..and sat. Then a couple of weeks ago some manager called me up and wanted to know how the case was doing. I guess they didn’t spend any time on it at all. I told him I already found a workaround, and he said because of that they were going to work up a KB entry on it then close the case. Then another week passes and I get an email saying OH! We see you found a workaround, we’ll forward that to engineering and get back to you. Yes the workaround I sent on JUNE 16.

So hope this helps someone, I’ll update this when/if they get a KB entry out on it. It’s certainly saved me a lot of time, it is very annoying to have to connect to each and every system to press enter to get it to continue to boot to workaround this bug.

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