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Marco
Asked: 2018-12-04 03:38:28 +0800 CST

VMware ESXi 6.5 Hypervisor unable to change the swap datastore after upgrade from 6.0

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On a standalone VMware host running ESXi 6.5 I'm unable to get the host cache and VM swapfiles to change SSD datastore.

It was running ESXi 6.0 (and I used to administer it with the legacy vSphere Client, might be relevant?) and it had a 128GB SSD0 as only SSD datastore.

Until the host was running ESXi 6.0 SSD0 was configured for both host cache and swapfile location (two different settings in the legacy client).

Then the image was updateded to ESXi 6.5 using the coventional way for standalone hosts, with this command in ssh while in maintenance mode:

esxcli software profile update -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml -p ESXi-6.5.0-20181004001-standard

After the update (and a few months) SSD0 became too small for the number of running VMs and I added 480Gb SSD1 too.

I went to the web client (no more legacy vSphere client in 6.5) and I've set the only available swap/cache option (in Host > Manage > System > Swap) to SSD1.

swap setting in 6.5

I've shutdown all running VMs and made an host reboot. Even after such operation, SSD0 has sys swap and VM's swapfiles, and SSD1 is still empty. Take a look at both datastore's ls:

datastore ls

I couldn't find relevant informations in the host's logs.

The setting in the web panel looks good across reboots, shows SSD1 as the setting was correctly saved but it's not applied!

How to further diagnose/fix this behavior?

HW details: Dell T130 latest (Dec. '18) UEFI 2.5.0, Xeon E3-1240v5, 64GB ECC, PERC H730 1GB NVcache + BBU, SSD0 is Sandisk's Plus-128, SSD1 is Sandisk's Ultra-480. Both drives are correctly seen as SSD storage by both PERC's bios and the VMware Hypervisor.

SW details: Running image is 6.5.0 Update 2 (Build 10175896) free license. At the time of update, the server was running ESXi-6.0.0-20180904001-standard

EDIT #4 By editing the .vmx for each VM, I was able to change the VM swap datastore. I still can't change the host swap to SSD1.

EDIT #3 After further investigations I removed from the question some non relevant details.

EDIT #2 I've found you can configure and set the swap datastore with esxcli sched swap system get and set. The get command shows the correct result. The set command followed by a reboot changes anything. Swap files for both VM and hostcache still reside in SSD0.

I think I'm out of troubleshooting options.

[root@xXx:~] esxcli sched swap system get
   Datastore Active: false
   Datastore Enabled: true
   Datastore Name: SSD1
   Datastore Order: 1
   Hostcache Active: true
   Hostcache Enabled: true
   Hostcache Order: 0
   Hostlocalswap Active: false
   Hostlocalswap Enabled: true
   Hostlocalswap Order: 2
[root@xXx:~] find /vmfs/volumes/SSD*/ -maxdepth 1 -type f -name *swp
/vmfs/volumes/SSD0/sysSwap-hc-57487483-06f8-5d5a-47cb-a0369f9b821a.swp
/vmfs/volumes/SSD0/vmx-aaa-209631360-1.vswp
/vmfs/volumes/SSD0/aaa-0c7eb880.vswp
/vmfs/volumes/SSD0/vmx-bbb-4128220575-1.vswp
/vmfs/volumes/SSD0/bbb-f60fa59f.vswp
/vmfs/volumes/SSD0/vmx-ccc-2862447631-1.vswp
/vmfs/volumes/SSD0/ccc-aa9d7c0f.vswp
[root@xXx:~] ls -la /vmfs/volumes/SSD1/
total 1480832
drwxr-xr-t    1 root     root         73728 Dec  3 11:51 .
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           512 Dec  5 10:47 ..
-r--------    1 root     root       8216576 Dec  1 14:05 .fbb.sf
-r--------    1 root     root     134807552 Dec  1 14:05 .fdc.sf
-r--------    1 root     root     268632064 Dec  1 14:05 .jbc.sf
-r--------    1 root     root      16908288 Dec  1 14:05 .pb2.sf
-r--------    1 root     root         65536 Dec  1 14:05 .pbc.sf
-r--------    1 root     root     1074331648 Dec  1 14:05 .sbc.sf
drwx------    1 root     root         69632 Dec  1 14:05 .sdd.sf
-r--------    1 root     root       7340032 Dec  1 14:05 .vh.sf
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         73728 Oct  4 13:02 dddd
[root@xXx:~]

EDIT #1 I had a missing update, but updating didn't solve, unfortunately. I'm now running 6.5.0 Build 10884925.

vmware-esxi

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