Linux Virtual Machine Troubleshooting – Unable to collect IPv4 routing table

I would like to share the troubleshooting experience which i have faced recently with linux virtual machine. OS support team was performing the scheduled OS reboots and they rebooted list of Redhat Linux servers and they noticed few virtual machines are booting very slow and looks operating system is unresponsive while booting.  It throws the error “vmsvc [warning] [guestinfo] RecordRoutingInfo: Unable to collect IPv4 routing table” in the virtual machine console. They immediately brought to my notice and I did an small research and found an VMware KB article , which exactly talks about this issue. This issue occurs when the Linux iputils package causes a delay in the boot process. A warning message appears when the guestinfo plug-in tool fails to parse the content from the /proc/net/route file. The guest operating system’s clock is ahead of the host on which it is running, causing the arping process to become unresponsive during boot. This results in the delayed boot times.When a virtual machine is affected this issue occurs every time it boots, but it does not happen on every Linux virtual machine. VMware KB article suggested an .VMX file edit to fix this issue. Let’s look into the detailed procedure to fix this issue ” Unable to collect IPv4 routing table.

 

Unable to collect IPv4 routing table

Fix – Unable to collect IPv4 routing table

To fix or workaround this issue on the linux operating system,  add rtc.diffFromUTC=0 to the .vmx file of the affected virtual machine. This forces a time sync, which enables the arping process to complete as expected leading to normal boot times. We will explain the detailed procedure how to edit the virtual machine configuration file to fix this issue.

  1. Power off the affected Linux virtual machine.
  2. Log in to the ESXi host on which the affected virtual machine is located with SSH.
  3. Browse towards the the virtual machine’s Configuration file (VM_name.vmx) file location (located at /vmfs/volumes/datastore_name/vm_name).
  4. It is always recommended to create the backup file of .VMX before making edit to the virtual machine configuration file. You can create backup using the command  (CP VM_name.vmx VM_name.VMX.bak)
  5. Open and edit the original .vmx file with a text editor such as VI editor. Enter “i” to start inserting the edits.
  6. Add this entry to the end of the .vmx file:  rtc.diffFromUTC=0 Unable to collect IPv4 routing table
  7. Close and save the .vmx file using  (:wq)
  8. Power on the Linux virtual machine.

That’s it. After adding the Configuration edit on the virtual machine.  Issue “Unable to collect IPv4 routing table” got fixed and virtual machine booted without any issue. I hope this article is informative for you. Thanks for Reading!!!. Be social and share it in social media, if you feel worth sharing it.

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