Our guys and gals that support Storage issues have identified the top 10 KB articles that get the most bang for the buck. These articles help resolve a lot of problems that customers run into. You might enjoy this list if you’ve ever run into issues with your storage arrays.

Watch this space in the coming days for more top ten lists. Coming up next, Installation KBs!

We recently discovered an issue that will only occur under very specific conditions. We felt that given the fact that there is a potential for data corruption, we would highlight this KB article here.

All of these conditions must be met to be affected:

• Systems with ESX/ESXi 4.0 installed
• The system is equipped with a RAID controller using one of these drivers:

  megaraid2
  megaraid_sas
  aacraid

• RAID controller battery backup unit is completely discharged after a shutdown (48 hours or longer)
• Local disks are attached to the affected HBA

Data corruption might occur because the RAID controller cache is not cleared while shutting down the server and will be lost when the battery backup is depleted.

Note that our team is working on a permanent solution to this issue.

Continue reading System does not clear RAID controller cache during shutdown

Based on the kind of questions and issues that come into support we’ve compiled a list of the top Knowledge Base articles for what we term ‘System Management’ issues. System Management is a difficult category to describe.  It generally revolves around vCenter and managing the resources it is in control of. DRS, HA, and VMotion come to mind as an example.

Here are some feature articles for this area:

Ever since vSphere 4 came out we’ve had a surge in questions about the new licensing model. Did you know our Knowledge Base covers licensing as well as hard-core technical topics?

We tend to think of the Knowledge Base as a problem & fix resource, but we want to get the word out that it  also works as a general Q&A or FAQ resource.

Based on the kind of questions and issues that have come up we’ve compiled this list of the top Knowledge Base articles for Licensing.

Also not to be missed is our Communities Roundtable podcast #44 which covers licensing.

Today we published what someone here termed the Grand-daddy of all KB’s for Timekeeping issues with Linux guests. This is a frequently discussed topic in our forums and in the blogosphere in general, and the new KB is meant to guide you to the earliest resolution possible for any issues with clock speed in your Linux VMs.

Troubleshooting timekeeping issues in Linux guest operating systems (1011771)

Rumor has it that another, similar KB, about timekeeping issues in Windows guests is in the works.  Keep an eye on this space…