ESXI Goof

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T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
7,625
2,043
113
I think you guys are going to get a great laugh out of this one :)

It's been a bit warmer in my office lately so I didn't think anything of my ESXI AIO box running a bit louder (fans rpm up) but it's been over a day now and cooler at night (almost midnight) so I thought I should login to vshepere and ssh to see what's actually going on.

- Only VM powered up is omniOS & no active streaming / file sharing going on
- OmniOS (used for esxi as aio / providing storage) showing ~500mhz utilized
- Host showing ~ 3.5Ghz utilized
- Fans def. running 300RPM+ more than idle even when doing a lot of file-work on OmniOS (ZFS) via NFS

Made me wonder WHATTTTTTTTTTT is going on... to be eating all that CPU.... checked the performance tab for my host and saw that DCUI was using a lot of CPU... went into SSH and did an esxtop to get a bit more granular and DCUI was once again #1... nothing much else going on.

I'm thinking to myself how can the console be doing anything (after I looked up DCUI as I'm not a VMWare Pro) it's behind my desk right now (while testing) and I know no one is using the console.

Sooooooo.... I stand up to examine it (gotta turn on the screen) it's on the yellow splash, I look down to login and a SSD I had sitting behind the keyboard fell onto one of the F Keys and that was apparently freaking out ESXI even though I was not logged into console and it was NOT the F key to change setting / invoke a login.

So! Lesson learned, holding down a key even when not logged in was freaking ESXI out enough to use 3.5Ghz of CPU!! Keyboard removed!

ScreenClip.png
My power usage went from 175W to 125W. (N0 VM running)


Have a laugh at my expense :)
 

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
1,708
515
113
Canada
I had a similar incident not long after I first got into using ESXi. Same thing as @T_Minus, crap I had lying about had slipped and fell onto the KB causing all my VM's to slow to a crawl. I quickly learned to remove/ unplug my KB whenever I wasn't actually using it :)
 

TeeJayHoward

Active Member
Feb 12, 2013
376
112
43
Looks like it's time to go headless!

Honestly, I never would have expected that to be the culprit. That's kinda awesome.