Description
Windows 2008 guests are crashing at random times a linux host running CentOS 5.4 and VMware Server 2.x.The vmware-vmx process crashing at random times. There is no blue screen (BSoD) on the guests, the linux process is just crashing.
Sometimes the web management GUI is crashing as well.
Solution
This is likely to be the result of upgrading glibc to version 2.5-42.The workaround is to downgrade glibc:
1) Backup /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
2) Update /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo to look like the following lines:
[base53]
name=CentOS-5.3 - Base
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=5.3&arch=$basearch&repo=os
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5
[updates53]
name=CentOS-5.3 - Updates
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=5.3&arch=$basearch&repo=updates
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5
3) yum downgrade glibc glibc-common
4) Restore the backup of /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
5) Add exclude=glibc* to it to prevent future updates of glibc.
Affected software:
Linux 2.6.xVMware Server 2.x