Hello all. First post. Been playing with ESXi for a few months and I'm having an unusual issue. Here's my hardware and VM setup:
Hardware: Supermicro x9scm-f-o with 32GB of ECC RAM and E3-1230v2 CPU
Also included is a M1015 reflashed to IT mode and used as passthrough with VT-d to the FreeNAS VM.
VMs:
FreeNAS 8.3.1 64-bit with 20GB of RAM assigned (3vCPU)
Linux Mint 13 LTS 4GB RAM (3vCPU)
Cyberpower UPS Appliance VM 2GB RAM (1vCPU)
After building the machine a week or two went by, then I lost network connectivity to the entire box(this was when I first realized something might be wrong). I couldn't use the vSphere client or access the guest machines. I attempted to "Restart Management Network" locally but that didn't solve anything. Still no connectivity. I then attempted to shutdown the box but it wouldn't shutdown. Ultimately I power cycled it.
So over the last 2 months at random times I've lost network connectivity. Thanks to reading various sources I've found an error in my syslog that ends up being logged 5-20+ times in a row, and happens randomly at intervals of 2-10 minutes. I get an error that says:
Unknown: out of memory [5880]
I thought it was due to my VMs using a lot of network connections, but never really could find someone else with the error. It's very non-specific and I'm running out of leads to check out the issue, hence I've turned to the community.
Well, today I have decided I want to figure this puzzle out, so I shutdown all of the VMs and that error still continues to show up in the syslog. So clearly I have a configuration problem somewhere. This is odd to me because I've tried to avoid changing settings that I wasn't 100% sure was appropriate for me because Im a newbie to ESXi and I'd rather not break my own installation. The only thing I've done that might be construed as an 'advanced' feature modification is I enabled the RDM function for the Linux Mint installation. It was already on a hard drive and I thought I'd just do RDM passthrough and use it that way if it worked. Well, it has so I left it like that.
I can't find much info on what 5880 might represent, so I assumed its a PID or something. It has changed from one bootup to the next. So here's the output from the CLI:
~ # ps -P | grep 5880
5880 5880 sfcb-vmware_raw 5606 /sbin/sfcbd
5881 5880 sfcb-vmware_raw 5606 /sbin/sfcbd
5882 5880 sfcb-vmware_raw 5606 /sbin/sfcbd
5883 5880 sfcb-vmware_raw 5606 /sbin/sfcbd
5884 5880 sfcb-vmware_raw 5606 /sbin/sfcbd
5885 5880 sfcb-vmware_raw 5606 /sbin/sfcbd
5887 5880 sfcb-vmware_raw 5606 /sbin/sfcbd
5888 5880 sfcb-vmware_raw 5606 /sbin/sfcbd
~ #
Again, I tried searching for sfcbd and it really doesn't give me any clues.
I actually built 2 identical systems. One for me and one for a friend. He uses more RAM for his VMs(and different VMs) but he doesn't have this issue. I'm figuring I've done something to my installation to deserve this since his is flawless, but I am out of leads.
tl;dr: I get the "Unknown: out of memory" error along with a loss of all network connectivity randomly after 1 day to 2 weeks. Sometimes when the server would be idle(such as at night). I don't know if they are related, but I assume they are.
Anyone have ideas to try? This is baffling me and I'm really at a loss to explain the problem let alone how to fix it.
Thanks!