ESX virtual machine on NFS fails with swap errors

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Virtual machine running on NFS datastore fails with swap related errors.
• In the vmkernel.log file, you see errors similar to:
  
  Unable to read swapped out PPN,Alloc_GetPhysMemRange failed for PPN 0x20598 status = Permission denied.
  
  Alloc_GetPhysMemRange failed for PPN 0x944a status = Invalid handle
  
  
• In the vmware.log file of the affected virtual machine, you see the error:
  
  MONITOR PANIC: vmk: vcpu-0:Unable to read swapped out PPN(0x13dda) from swap slot(0x101d75f) for VM(1337)

Environment

VMware ESXi 3.5.x Installable
VMware ESX Server 3.0.x
VMware ESX Server 3.5.x
VMware ESXi 3.5.x Embedded

Resolution

This issue is resolved in ESX 3.5 Update 5 and ESX 4.x, available at VMware Infrastructure Download Center and vSphere Download Center.

If you are experiencing this issue on ESX 3.5 Update 4 or earlier, you can improve the reliability of the virtual machine by relocating the swap file location to a non-NFS datastore. Either SAN or local storage datastores iimprove virtual machine stability. For more information, see the Changing Virtual Machine Options section in theBasic System Administration Guide