StarWind Software

I've been using startwind and vmware vcenter 4 successfully for the last month. I now want to backup the iscsi drive images and realized that its going to be difficult to copy a single 300G drive image.

So, i created a compressed drive thinking that the actual storage space would be much less to backup.

I have the compressed and non-compressed iscsi drives accessible to the ESX 4.0 server and did a vmware Migrate. This is when the problems started.

In the starwind log files i see

7/24 12:11:18.546 300 IMG: *** ImageFile_ReadWriteSectors: WriteFileEx(0x02210000, 1024, 0x963b53e00) failed (33).

If (33) is a windows error then this means

ERROR_LOCK_VIOLATION 33 (0x21) - The process cannot access the file because another process has locked a portion of the file

This is my config

localhost:3260
StarWind iSCSI Target v4.1 (Build 20090515, Win32)
Active license count: Unlimited
Machine ID: 444D3xxxx
License ID: 19xxx
License Type: FREE Edition
User name: Unknown
Organization: Unknown
Registered plugins: imagefile, virtualdvd, ramdisk

Windows reports that the iscsi file is 97.6G and 30.3G on disk.

I have one esx 4.0 server connecting to it.

It appears to be a size or sector related issue since i have 9vm's on the drive but cant add a 10'th. I can migrate vms off but cant go past beyond this "locked portion of the file" (if that is the problem).

Thanks in advance for any guidance you can offer!

Hello mbalsam,

Please clarify whether you were able to perform a complet migration to a compressed storage, or was the process interrupted somewhere in the middle?

If you have complete the migration, would it be possible to temporarily disconnect the compressed target and then re-connect it to your ESX?

Thanks

I migrated several VM's successfully. Then i got to a point where it would not accept any more VM's. From then on any migration would end in an ESX failure.

I was able to migrate all of the VM's back to a non-compressed drive and kept working.

So, at this point I dont have a way of testing anymore. But if you think this should work, i can attempt to set it up again.

I do know that the entire ESX server and the storage server were restarted before the problems started and then a day after the problems were encountered again. Which would indicate that the locked sectors persisted between reboots..

We will try to reproduce this in our testing lab and let you know about the results.

Thanks