Virtual Machine issues

This section includes troubleshooting topics about virtual machine issues.

Administration Virtual Machine on Your Primary or High-Availability System is Down

Problem    Your administration virtual machine on your primary or high-availability system is down. You can view your system status by selecting System > View More > Properties. The Administration Site is inaccessible and you see an error message in your browser window (for example, "We've hit a glitch in processing your request.").
Possible Cause    There may be a problem with the management of the virtual machine in VMware vSphere.
Solution    Obtain your VMware logs ( kb.vmware.com) and provide them to your Cisco TAC representative. Your representative will use the logs to determine if there is a virtual machine issue on your system. Note that the Tasks and Events messages (virtual machine events from the Tasks and Events tab) are important for troubleshooting purposes.

NIC Teaming Issues

Problem    You configured NIC teaming for failover and load balancing and all of your virtual machines seem to be running properly but you begin to encounter problems running the product at maximum load due to meeting failures.
Possible Cause    Open your VMware vSphere console and determine if your NIC teaming is working properly on the UCS Servers that are hosting Cisco WebEx Meetings Server virtual machines. This often occurs due to a failed connection from a NIC, forcing another NIC to take on the full network load. This is especially important if your NICs are Gigabit-Ethernet NICS since at maximum port load any one of your NICs would be running to maximum link capacity. So a catastrophic failure on one Gigabit-Ethernet NIC causes the entire networking load to fall on the other NIC, saturating the link and causing application-level issues within Cisco WebEx Meetings Server.
Solution    Put Cisco WebEx Meetings Server in maintenance mode, fix or replace the failed NIC, and then restore service to end-users.

Virtual Machine Does Not Boot Up After Deployment

Problem    The virtual machine does not boot up after deployment.
Possible Cause    The Cisco UCS Server (on which the virtual machine is deployed) does not meet the minimum requirements for the system size.
Solution    Check the system requirements for your system size and ensure that there is enough CPU, memory, and free disk space. Refer to the Cisco WebEx Meetings Server System Requirements for more information.

Virtual Machine Fails and Cannot Be Recovered

Problem    One of your virtual machines fails and you are unable to fix it even with the assistance of the Cisco TAC.
Possible Cause    There are several possible causes including the following: you have a corrupt database, you have a faulty configuration, unsupported maintenance activity, power failures, hardware failures, and more.
Solution    If a virtual machine on your high-availability configuration fails, remove the high-availability virtual machine from your system. Redeploy all of your high-availability virtual machines and then reconfigure the system for high availability. Refer to "Configuring a High Availability System" in the Cisco WebEx Meetings Server Administration Guide for more information. Similarly if an Internet Reverse Proxy virtual machine fails, you must remove that virtual machine from your system. Then redeploy and reconfigure your Internet Reverse Proxy virtual machine. Refer to "Adding Public Access" in the Cisco WebEx Meetings Server Administration Guide for more information. For any other virtual machine, your must rebuild your system using the Disaster Recovery feature. Refer to "Using the Disaster Recovery Feature" in the Cisco WebEx Meetings Server Administration Guide for more information.

Virtual Machine Issues and Crashes

Problem    Your virtual machine crashes and does not resume functioning.
Possible Cause   
Attempt to perform the following solutions:
  • Solution    Attempt to restart your virtual machine from VMware vCenter.
  • If you took snapshots of your virtual machines, attempt to restore a snapshot.

    Note
    Solution    Snapshots might not contain all of your configuration information and you might have to perform some configuration tasks to restore all functions on your system.
  • Solution    If you configured a storage server, you can attempt to perform a disaster recovery procedure to restore your system. Refer to "Using the Disaster Recovery Feature" in your Administration Guide for more information.
  • Solution    If none of the above solve your problem, contact the Cisco TAC for assistance. You can contact the TAC at the following URL: http:/​/​www.cisco.com/​cisco/​web/​support/​index.html

Virtual Machine Repeatedly Reboots

Problem    The virtual machine on which I have deployed the Cisco WebEx Meetings Server OVA, repeatedly reboots.
Possible Cause    NTP is not configured on the ESXi host.
Solution    Configure NTP on your ESXi host, check the DNS on your ESXi host to make sure it is resolving the NTP server correctly, and then redeploy the OVA to the virtual machine.

Your Virtual Machine is Repeatedly Rebooting After a Power Outage

Problem    Your virtual machine is repeatedly rebooting after a power outage without allowing the operating system to load. No SSH or GUI access is available.
Possible Cause    Your file system is corrupted.
Solution    This is applicable to any Cisco WebEx Meetings Server virtual machine. When a virtual machine boots, you will see this message on the console: Booting Cent OS (<string_numbers_letters>) in <number> seconds. Press any key to interrupt the boot process and display the GNU GRUB boot loader menu. Press e to edit the commands before booting the virtual machine. Press the down arrow key to select the kernel line and then press e to edit the kernel line. Append this text to the kernel line: init=/bin/sh (make sure there is a space before init). Press the Enter key to save your changes and return to the previous menu. Press b to boot. Mount the root file system by typing this command: mount -o remount,rw / . Invoke superuser mode by entering su at the command line to get root access. From there, enter fsck to check and repair your file system. Press y to the prompts to repair any issues found. After you are finished, reboot the virtual machine by using the RESET function in vCenter. If the issue is resolved, the virtual machine should boot normally. Check the system status by entering hastatus at the command line. If this does not work and TAC is unable to find any workaround, follow the Disaster Recovery process that is described in the Cisco WebEx Meetings Server Administration Guide.