Linux – How to trigger NMI in VMware

linuxvirtual-machinesvmware-vsphere

Our physical Linux servers have an ILO board that may be used to create an non-maskable interrupt. This easily triggers the creation of a kernel dump in case the server is unresponsive. How can this be done in a virtual machine?

In order to debug unresponsible Linux servers, we currently trigger the kernel dump of virtual machines via key combination ALT+SysRq+c. However it does not work via terminal server connection – especially with different keyboard mappings and various client configurations.

To straighten the process, we would like to use the API or to use a native Vmware method that triggers a NMI on hung machines.

Is this possible?

Best Answer

On the actual ESXi host, logged in as root run this;

/sbin/vmdumper <world_id> nmi

where is that of the VM you want to NMI.

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As of GNU coreutils 7.5 released in August 2009, sort allows a -h parameter, which allows numeric suffixes of the kind produced by du -h:

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If you are using a sort that does not support -h, you can install GNU Coreutils. E.g. on an older Mac OS X:

brew install coreutils
du -hs * | gsort -h

From sort manual:

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You're dealing with two different classes of products here. Virtualbox is a desktop virtualization system, and ESXi is a server virtualization system. As such, the VMware vSphere client is not really meant to be used for heavy day-to-day operations. You'll find performance to be significantly better if you enable remote desktop on the Windows 7 VM and connect via an RDP client.

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