Redhat – After applying patches and rebooting, RHEL 5.3 hangs on udev

This is odd. Since you are experiencing loss on both nics I would suspect that this would rule out a nic specific firmware issue, a kernel driver issue, or a faulty hardware issue (Except with respect to the motherboard). Although the logs you have posted are specific to BNX2. Have you verified that other machines connected to this same switch with the same hardware profile are not exhibiting the same problem? You should try hard coding the nics to 100 mbit/full as well as the switch, and as silly as it sounds check for faulty cabling. Finally, if resources permit why not try hooking up that machine to a third party switch (like a netgear or something equally innocuous). ?

If multiple nodes are experiencing link loss simultaneously I would go as far as to say that you may have a spanning tree error that is consistently casing your switch to fail and re converge. Any more information as to topology would help diagnose the issue.

I have recently had to migrate a few centos 5.x VMs across to an ESXi cluster. A couple of things were needed before the VMs would boot.

• Firstly you will need to ensure the rescue CD can see the hardisks: if you cant see them when you do a fdisk -l then try updating the SCSI controller type to LSI logic SAS.

• Once you are able to see the disk in the rescue environment allow it to mount all the system partitions read/write when it asks. You will also need a network connection to download packages, so assign details when it asks.

• If the automatic mounting fails you will need to manually mount the / partition and edit the /etc/fstab. The entres will be something like:

  /dev/xvda2 / ext4 defaults 1 1 change the xvda2 to sda2 or whatever it is in your case.

• reboot to check that the disks are mounted by the rescue CD. Chroot into the /mnt/sysimage folder edit /etc/inittab you should delete an entry that looks like:

  co:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty xvc0 9600 vt100-nav

  and ensure there is a correct entry such as:

  1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1 (sometimes this will need to be uncommented)

• Now you can run a 'yum install kernel' and then create an initrd buy doing a:

  mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-194.32.1.el5.img 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5

  replacing the 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5 with name of the kernel that you installed in the last step.

• Now delete any xen related kernel entries in /etc/grub.conf leaving the newly added non-xen kernel and ensuring it is the default.

• Exit the rescue environment and boot from hard-disk. With any luck the VM will boot as normal.

Its quite an long process and i might have missed something out, so id be interested in hearing how you get on.