Boot failure troubleshooting flowchart

Here's a good flowchart in helping you pcmasterrace troubleshooting your boot failure. Click Here. Warning, large size image

Host Profile Compliant Failures

After doing ESX upgrade you might encounter with host profile compliance failure.

eg:
Expected user input parameters missing. Check the host customization settings for the host.

To solve this, you need to update the answer file for the host profile with the username and password that used to join the host to the domain. The host does not store this locally so after the upgrade you need to do this again.

Go to Home > Host Profiles > Hosts and Clusters

Right click on the host with the non compliant, Update Answer File.

Once done, check the compliance again.

Disk drive is write protected, Unable to create file with File system error (65535)

Some simptoms:


Unable to create file with File system error (65535)

Whenever I try to create new file in my one of my system drives it is displaying "Unable to create file xxxx.txt". File system error(65535) Previously I was able to create/delete files.

Now every thing related to file operations are getting failed (create/delete/modify).

For file modify following error message is displayed "The drive cannot fine sector requested".



Second hard drive says write-protected
I've got a new 2008 enterprise terminal server. I've installed all my apps to the 2nd hard drive. Now for no reason, I can't write to the drive and my apps can't either as they all crash as soon as they need to.

I get this exact error when simply trying to create a directory in the root of the drive:

"The disk is write-protected.

Remove the write-protection or use another disk."

I'm logging in as the local admin, domain admin makes no diff. I've also given full permissions to "everyone" with no luck. How the heck can I fix this bugger?

Solution:

It could be that the ReadOnly flag is on, do the following


on cmd prompt launch "diskpart.exe"

on the diskpart prompt, do the following

LIST DISK

This will give you a list of all disks in your system
Note down the number of your problem disk, then do the folloiwng

SELECT DISK x

Where x is the number of your problem disk, then do the following

DETAIL DISK

This will list all the details of your problem disk
Check if the ReadOnly flag is set to Yes

If the ReadOnly flag is set to Yes, do the follwing

ATTR DISK CLEAR READONLY

This should clear the flag on the disk, please retry your disk operations

If ths does not solve it, we have another flag on the volume, same command, but now on volume:

LIST VOLUME

SELECT VOLUME x

DETAIL VOLUME

ATTR VOLUME CLEAR READONLY

Reset HP ILO using SSH

There are times when your HP ILO (Integrated Lights-Out) web interface stop responding, and you need to reset it to get it working again. You can use SSH session to do the reset. 

This will not reset the server, just the ILO session.

1) open up an SSH session (you can use PuTTy) to your ILO (using the same IP as web interface) and login
2) once in, type "cd /map1" without the quotes, then press ENTER
3) type "reset" without the quotes, then press ENTER again
4) wait for about a minute, then try to login to your web interface again.

It should be something like this. 

User:######### logged-in to ##############
iLO 2 Standard Blade Edition 2.05 at 13:38:05 Dec 16 2010
Server Name: ###################
Server Power: On 

</>hpiLO-> cd /map1 

status=0
status_tag=COMMAND COMPLETED
/map1 

</map1>hpiLO-> reset 

status=0
status_tag=COMMAND COMPLETED 

Resetting iLO. 

CLI session stopped

Active memory or consumed memory

Referring to older post about getting the numbers of memory and CPU usage HERE, lets go deeper into the memory part.

The script collect the usage of memory active, instead of memory consumed. It is the amount of memory that is actively used, as estimated by VMkernel based on recently touched memory pages (REF).

That is not a very good indicator if you're doing a VM resizing plan, or chargeback. To get a better view, use consumed memory counter instead. This is closest guess of what is the amount of memory used by the guest VM.

Or, get Veeam One monitor ;-)


Read more about memory counters

Windows Slowdown, Investigated and Identified

reblogging from http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/windows-slowdown-investigated-and-identified/

all credits goes to original author, I'm merely archiving it for my personal future reference.
in short, if your free memory is high, and cached is low, there's a culprit in there.