Hallo everybody,

I have a problem with a new installed ESXi4 machine here.

These are my hardware specs:

MB: Supermicro X8SIL-F (Intel 3420 Chipset)
CPU: Intel Core i3 530
RAM: Kingston 4 GB ECC
HDD: one SATA WD2502ABYS


Aprox. 6-7 minutes after boot the system starts to produce messages like this on the log console (Alt-F12):

"cpuX:4160(BC: 3582: Failed to flush xx buffers of size 8192 each for object 'sel.raw' 1 4 9b3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0: No free memory for file data"


These messages then appear every 15 seconds or so.

I can start virtual machines and they run fine.
But when I try to change any configuration entry, vSphere Client says:

"Error interacting with configuration file /etc/vmware/esx.conf: Write failed during Unlock. This is likely due to a full or read-only filesystem."
...
"Unable to write to file /etc/vmware/esx.conf.nrXz5e while saving /etc/vmware/esx.conf operation aborted. It is likely this was caused by a Full Disk."

But the disk cannot be full!

I already installed the system 3 times from scratch but the problem persists.
The messages even appear before any VM is created.
I just boot the machine and leave it alone for 6-7 minutes.

I tried another harddrive, just to be sure.
I patched the system to the latest available build (244038).
Problem stays.

Any idea is appreciated!

--Dennis

Meanwhile I discovered that the problem has somehow to do with the onboard IPMI on the mainboard.

First I deactivated the IPMI (BMC) feature by jumper.
I booted up ESXi and let it run for a few hours. No more error messages. No more problems.

Then I deactivated the CIM-feature in ESXi and activated the mainboard IPMI again.
Now the server is already running for 48h without any problems.

The setting is under the configuration tab, advanced settings:
UserVars: UserVars.CIMEnabled
Default was 1 and I set it to 0.

Now ESXi cannot show sensor status anymore but I can live with that for the moment.

Perhaps some firmware update or ESXi update will sort this out sometime in the future...


--Dennis