System information

Procedure
1 Select Start > Run.
2 In the command window, type regedit.exe, and click OK.
3 In the left panel hierarchy view, double-click first HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, then System, then
CurrentControlSet, then Services, and then Disk.
4 Select the TimeOutValue and set the data value to x03c (hexadecimal) or 60 (decimal).
After you’ve made this change, Windows waits at least 60 seconds for delayed disk operations to complete
before it generates errors.
5 Click OK to exit the Registry Editor.
Set Device Driver Options for SCSI Controllers
This section describes how to set device driver options for QLogic, Emulex, or other SCSI card drivers.
Procedure
1 Back up the file /etc/vmware/esx.conf, and open it for editing.
The file includes a section for each SCSI device, as in the following example.
/device/002:02.0/class = "0c0400"
/device/002:02.0/devID = "2312"
/device/002:02.0/irq = "19"
/device/002:02.0/name = "QLogic Corp QLA231x/2340 (rev 02)"
/device/002:02.0/options = ""
/device/002:02.0/owner = "vmkernel"
/device/002:02.0/subsysDevID = "027d"
/device/002:02.0/subsysVendor = "1014"
/device/002:02.0/vendor = "1077"
/device/002:02.0/vmkname = "vmhba0"
2 Find the options line right under the name line and modify it as appropriate.
3 Repeat for every SCSI adapter that is controlled by the same driver if needed.
Sharing Diagnostic Partitions
Generally, you use the local disc of your ESX/ESXi host as a diagnostic partition. If you have diskless ESX
servers that boot from a SAN, multiple hosts can share one diagnostic partition on the same SAN LUN.
If more than one ESX/ESXi system uses the same LUN as the diagnostic partition, that LUN must be zoned so
that all the servers can access it.
Each server needs 100MB of space, so the size of the LUN determines how many servers can share it. Each
ESX/ESXi system is mapped to a diagnostic slot. VMware recommends at least 16 slots (1600MB) of disk space
if servers share a diagnostic partition.
If there is only one diagnostic slot on the device, all ESX/ESXi systems sharing that device map to the same
slot. This setup can easily create problems. If two ESX/ESXi systems perform a core dump at the same time,
the core dumps are overwritten on the last slot on the diagnostic partition.
If you allocate enough disk space for 16 slots, it is unlikely that core dumps are mapped to the same location
on the diagnostic partition, even if two ESX/ESXi systems perform a core dump at the same time.
Chapter 6 Managing ESX/ESXi Systems That Use SAN Storage
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