MS SQL 2008 R2, issue: impossible to Modify a Maintenance Plan

Some time ago, I wrote an article about upgrading a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express edition to a full Standard Edition. Today I discovered that the transaction log of the vCenter Server database (in my homelab) has grown and needed some maintenance. VMware published KB 1003980 “Troubleshooting transaction logs on a Microsoft SQL database server” on this subject. However It is not my intention to go for a Simple recovery Model. So I decided to create a Maintenance Plan. After creating a Maintenance Plan, I discovered that it is not possible to modify an existing Maintenance Plan. There is an Modify option, but it just does not work.

Running VM shows “Unable to connect to the MKS: VMX connection handshake failed for the mks of… ”

While trying to open the console of a running Windows VM, nothing appears except a message “Unable to connect to the MKS: VMX connection handshake failed for the mks of… ”. Google, found this interesting blog post and also VMware KB 1002001,”Powering on a virtual machine or accessing the console fails with a handshake error”.

The VM is also reported as non responsive by the end users. So it is decided to reboot this Windows VM. While conducting a Power Off using the vSphere Client, the action stopped on 95%. After a few minutes waiting, there is only one solution imho, that is following VMware KB 1004340 “Powering off a virtual machine  (on a ESX host)”. Follow KB 1014165 if it is an ESXi host.

In this case, I succeeded at this step under section “Using the ESX command line to kill the virtual machine”:

# ps auxwww |grep -i <VMNAME>.vmx

Followed by:

# kill <PID>

Although, I thought I knew the ps command pretty well, I was a little bit surprised by the use of the option www in auxwww. Try the same command with this option and see the difference:

# ps auxw |grep -i <VMNAME>.vmx

Enjoy reading and as always, I welcome your comments.