Debug Nexenta/OpenSolaris core files

debuggingnexentaopensolariszfs

I have a Sun x4540 that was recently converted to NexentaStor Enterprise Edition from an earlier OpenSolaris. The system disks were wiped and the zpools were exported and reimported. I'm hosting roughly 30 virtual machines to VMWare vSphere over NFS and 10GbE to several hosts.

Since that time, the system has been crashing almost every two weeks. The crash would trigger an ASR with the ILOm and the system would reboot on its own after 5-10 minutes. I have core files in the root directory as such:

-rw-------   1 root root 2237608178 Mar 14 21:06 core
-rw-------   1 root root   81061304 Feb  8 01:23 core.mountd.1297149806
-rw-------   1 root root   69863784 Mar  6 16:34 core.mountd.1299450869
-rw-------   1 root root   36644272 Mar  6 16:39 core.mountd.1299451179

How can I debug these with mdb to understand what is happening? I saw a brief tutorial linked to the Nexenta site at: http://kristof.willen.be/node/1100, but it doesn't seem to apply directly.

Best Answer

The key here was to change to the /var/crash/myhost directory and run the savecore -f vmdump.x command on the crash dump file. That process creates a unix.x file that can be used by the mdb -k unix.x vmcore.x command, where "x" is the core dump number.

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