I did an update last night that just showed up in my update manager.

I followed the usual steps, migrated all VM's, maintenance mode, stage, remediation...

Looks like the updates installed fine, but on reboot it never reconnected.

I can get to the host directly through the local client, and everything looks fine.

When I log in through the VSphere server the host refuses to connect.

Cannot contact the specified host (xxxx.xxxxx.com). The host may not be available...

Call "Datacenter.QueryConnectionInfo "for object "xxxxx" on vCenter Server "xxxx.xxxxx.com" failed.

I've update the client and server, figuring that could be the problem.  No luck.

I've done these updates 100+ times, and never experienced anything like this before.  Appears to have lost communication VSphere Server as near as I can tell.

Client 3237766

Server 1945274

The host version is a little odd.  The one that isn't update is 3116895, and the other is 3248547, but when I log in through Vcenter server it reports 3116895 as the build for both hosts.  I am guessing it simply stores the last build info because it's not actually connecting.

I've tried disconnecting and reconnecting.  Was going to try removing all together, but got a little nervous that I'd have to reconfigure the whole thing.  Seeing as how it was disconnected anyway, I did try adding it back as a new host unsuccessfully.  Same set of errors.

I'm at a loss.

I would think it would be something fairly simple considering it seems to be working fine when I connect directly through the client.  I've also been in the console and nothing looks out of sorts.

HELP!

HI there

I have an issue that started after network team messing with cables and that got my vcenter (VM) disconnected from all hosts. That would not be an issue, but I've started storage vmotion on one large VM in other datacenter (one Vcenter manages few of them), and now I see that storage vmotion has failed (timed out) and that I have 2VMs with the same name under new cluster where use to be just one. THis is VM that I was trying to migrate.

When I check datastores, I see that vmdk file is getting larger, so I'm thinking that this VM is still being copied onto new location.

VM is live and running, so question is what will happen when copy finishes?

I can not change name, or remove from inventory new VM (that is there in the inventory, but powered off), and I can not rename the old powered on machine also.

I've figured that if I wait for copy to finish, remove all powered on VMs off of this host (that now hosts both VMs) - this includes the VM I was trying to migrate, and leave only this "duplicate" and try to reboot the host, I'll be able to remove it from inventory, but wanted to check if anyone has any experience with such a thing, and can suggest what can also be resolution.

Of course, I do not have backup of this VM . as all these were on single host with hypervisor and I am in process of migrating them onto newly provisioned cluster using NFS as datastore.

Version is 5.5 for both vcenter and ESXi. Single host from which is migrated is 5.0

Thanks

S

Hi Guys,

Looking at NPIV doc for VCAP-DCA. Bit of confusion of NPIV Virtual Port and VM WWNs.

Some study guide talks about up to 4 virtual port per VM. My understanding the virtual port is WWN pair assigned to the VM which can be used as vHBA to FC fabric. In my 5.5 Lab, I can assign up to 16 WWN pairs on a VM (HW 8).

I can see the 4 virtual port limit in v4.1 document, but couldn't find it in v5 and v5.5. Has this limit removed from v5 and later??

Thanks.

VMware vSphere 4 - ESX and vCenter Server

vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center

Hello,

I need to know how to connect to ESXi host;

--> I can connect to KVM via putty

--> Now from inside putty, how to connect to ESXi host?

Thanks.

I downloaded vSphere Guest SDK (for vSphere 5.5) from the official VMware web site: VMware-GuestSDK-9.4.0-1280544.tar.gz. In my case I downloaded the Linux version.

Everything seems fine. I also found a ready-to-use Python script for interacting with libvmGuestLib. Thanks to this script I was able to use the VMware vSphere Guest SDK accessor functions for virtual machine data. The whole thing behind the scripts is that vmguestlib.py is used to define all the functions from the API and vmguest-stats is the tool to get all virtual machine counters in some human readable form.

And what does vmguest-stats exactly do? It calls 3 functions:

    OldElapsedMs = gl.GetElapsedMs()

    OldStolenMs = gl.GetCpuStolenMs()

    OldUsedMs = gl.GetCpuUsedMs()

Then sleeps for a while (set to 2 seconds in the delay variable) and calls the same functions again:

    NewElapsedMs = gl.GetElapsedMs()

    NewStolenMs = gl.GetCpuStolenMs()

    NewUsedMs = gl.GetCpuUsedMs()

Last, a calculation is done within the period:

    UsedCpu = (NewUsedMs - OldUsedMs) * 100.0 / (NewElapsedMs - OldElapsedMs)

    StolenCpu = (NewStolenMs - OldStolenMs) * 100.0 / (NewElapsedMs - OldElapsedMs)

    EffectiveMhz = gl.GetHostProcessorSpeed() * (NewUsedMs - OldUsedMs) / (NewElapsedMs - OldElapsedMs)

But there is some kind of mistery with the most important value for me -- the stolen time. If you are running a VMware guest and you need information for the stolen time of your VM (called ready time by VMware in some of their documents), you have to either use vSphere or esxtop, or get the value from the VMware vSphere Guest API. I am running the Python script on several machines along with the statistics from esxtop and the values do not have any differencies. For example, the values for %RDY (from esxtop) and CpuStolen (from the Guest SDK API) are almost equal (around 0% -- 0.5% -- 1%).

I installed and configured two new virtual machines on a new physical host and they are the only virtual machines on the host. I set up the Python script along with all other monitoring scripts and for the first two weeks the CPU usage and CPU stolen time were around 0%. The virtual machines are not in production yet, so they are running mostly in idle. And one day I saw my monitoring system has generated some triggers for 25% and above stolen time on both the virtual machines (reported from the Python script)! This is a very high value for a ready time. My first thought was that the two virtual machines are waiting each other for CPU time. My assumption was not good enough: the virtual machines, as I said, were running most of the time in idle. And neither esxtop, nor vSphere was reporting for high CPU loads.

Then I checked the CPU stolen values from esxtop and vSphere and they were around 0%: 0.35% maximum seen from esxtop (by pressing repeatedly the space for refreshing the screen) and maximum 176 ms (average 89 ms) of ready time seen from vSphere (for a period of 20 seconds, which is the default).

Then I run the Python script in order to get the raw values returned from the gl.GetElapsedMs(), gl.GetCpuStolenMs() and gl.GetCpuUsedMs() functions (in milliseconds - the way vSphere Guest SDK gives them):

These are the results without additional calculations. As you can see the ready time is a larger number compared to used time. It seems my machine is not using CPU, but it is waiting for CPU and is not scheduled to run.

My question is: why does vSphere Guest SDK report such large values for CPU ready time while esxtop and vSphere monitoring are reporting almost 0% of all loads (neither CPU used, nor ready time or any other parameter is above 0-1%). My VMs are working in idle, but from vSphere Guest SDK it seems that they have a high stolen time values.

I tried an older version of VMware vSphere Guest SDK (9.0) and the results are the same.

Thank you!

Hello All,

Is anyone able to offer any assistance with a 5.5.0 upgrade problem , Errno 39 at 24% ?

I had a PSOD when I booted ESX - bora/vmkernel/core/bootModule.c:122

KB for this indicated reinstall ESX over the top.  That didn't work as ESX would not install, said it was corrupted.

However, ESX had previously been upgraded from 5.5.0 to u2.  I used the recovery option when ESX boots and everything was fine when it then reverted to old version, 5.5.0 2068190...  ESX is up and VM's are working (phew).

So - I decided to upgrade then to u3, even if at the least it gives me this recovery option again.

U3 upgrade fails though with "OSError: [Errno 39] Directory not empty: 'vmfs/volumes/f43c8f72-55a88ebf-96e1-0c7041e9414c/System Volume Information'

KB for THAT problem indicates remove state.XXXXX, but in /bootbank there is no state.XXXX (there is no /var/log/vua.log either).

The vfms volume referred to in the error is actually /altbootbank not /bootbank. In /altbootbank is ->

~ # cd /altbootbank/
/vmfs/volumes/f43c8f72-55a88ebf-96e1-0c7041e9414c # ls -alR
.:
total 257
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           512 Jan  5 11:10 ..
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root             8 Jan  4 21:07 System Volume Information
-rwx------    1 root     root           196 Jan  5 01:13 imgdb.tgz

./System Volume Information:
total 513
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root             8 Jan  4 21:07 .
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root             8 Jan  1  1970 ..
-rwx------    1 root     root            76 Jan  4 21:07 IndexerVolumeGuid
-rwx------    1 root     root            12 Jan  4 21:07 WPSettings.dat
/vmfs/volumes/f43c8f72-55a88ebf-96e1-0c7041e9414c #

If I move imgdb.tgz somewhere else, it only wants to reinstall ESX not upgrade.

If I copy all of /bootbank to /altbootbank, I get the Errno 39 at 24% again.

Any clues anyone?

Thanks

HC.

I am very confused .WHO can tell me it exactly.3Q

Hi all,

I have three standalone ESXi 5.5 hosts in use.

All of them are domain joined and everything work fine until they lose their connections to our AD. That happens randomly and in most cases after a reboot.

Symptoms then are:

1. vSphere client login fails: "Cannot complete login due to an incorrect username or password."
2. Lost domain name in the "Select Users and Groups" dialog box. AD users are not longer selectable to assign permissions.

If I rejoin the ESXi all existing AD user entries are lost and I have configure it again.

Does anyone know that issue, or better a solution for it?

Best regards,

Dirk

Hi everybody

I hope you had got a great christmas and new year holidays throughout the world

I have just lunched a vmware Esxi 5.1 on my server for my new clients but when I attempt to start console view to install windows for the vm that I have created, I got an error  for my ssl cert which does not match.

How can I solve it?

I attached the screen shot of error to find out the issue easier

THank you in advance

Hi

Can anyone tell me what the ideal exhaust temp is for a host system board, and also what the starting temperature is that is unhealthy for the host?

Hi team,

We have an environment with the following configuration:

4 ESXi hosts 5.5 U2 Standard License

EQualogic iSCSI datastores

We are trying to delete one of our datastores, it has been successfully deleted from 3 of the hosts, but one of them has lost communication to the DS and does not allow us to delete the pointer to it:

Call "HostDatastoreSystem.RemoveDatastore" for object "datastoreSystem-49" on vCenter Server "VCENTER" failed.

Operation failed, diagnostics report: Unable to query live VMFS state of volume.: No such file or directory

- No IO control enabled

- It's not being used as DS Heartbeat

- Completely empty

- HBA Rescan doesn't work

- Unmount/delete do not work either from Vcenter nor from host

- Restarting management agents doesn't work

- Syslog path is pointing to a correct, active location for the esx host

- Can't use partitioning tools as there is no vmfs disk in the ESXi side, as per below commands

When querying ESXi host directly, we do not even get the /vmfs path:

~ # esxcfg-scsidevs -m

naa.603be83f7d6eaba6fb5e35baa20500e7:1                            :1                                                        55efba86-7d62f6d6-703e-549f35a01922  0  DSNAME

~ # ls /vmfs/devices/disks/

ls: /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.603be83f7d6eaba6fb5e35baa20500e7:1: No such file or directory

ls: /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.603be83f7d6eaba6fb5e35baa20500e7: No such file or directory

Any ideas on how to solve it other than rebooting? With only 4 hosts in our system, setting one in maintenance mode and rebooting is highly impacting.

Thanks

Neus

Hello,

Our company has to have a complete Data Center power outage in a couple of weeks. Power will be down for 2 hours.

We have 5 clusters, 14 hosts and 450 virtual machines.

We want to be able to power down all virtual machines in a specific order and then power them on in a specific order.

My main question:

Can someone tell me where I can set the host or cluster settings so that when I power on the ESXi host that it will leave the virtual machines off?

We want to use a script to power on the virtual machines in a specific order.

Also, if anyone has experience with this situation and can offer me advice I would really appreciate it. Thank you!

Steps:

power off virtual machines with script in a specific order

power off ESXi 5.5 update 1 hosts

power on ESXi 5.5 update 1 hosts

power on virtual machines with script in specific order.

I have experienced below issue on four(4) esxi 5.0.0, 623860

"Hardware monitoring service on this host is not responding or not available"

I applied both solution below which resolved two of the esxi but failed to resolve the remaining two esxi.

step 1:

1.Open an SSH session to the host. For more information, see Opening a command or shell prompt (1003892)

2.Run this command:

/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog restart

3.Go back to the Hardware Status tab on vCenter Server and click the Update link. It may take up to 5 minutes to refresh.

step 2:VMware KB: How to disable the CIM agent on the ESX/ESXi host

To disable the CIM agent on an ESXi host:

1.

Log in to the ESXi host in the Tech Support Mode as root. For more information, see Tech Support Mode for Emergency Support (1003677).

2.

Run these commands:

chkconfig sfcbd-watchdog off

chkconfig sfcbd off

/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog stop

Note: Changing the chkconfig disables the sfcbd service and is persistent across reboots.

To re-enable the CIM agent on the ESXi host, run these commands:

chkconfig sfcbd-watchdog on

chkconfig sfcbd on

/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog start

Note: To check the status of the agent on ESXi, run the below command.

/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog status

I need help please.

We know in VSP4, ESX comes with a firewall that controls traffic into and out of the Service, which is based on the Linux iptables firewall.

Is there any similar firewall in VSP5.x or later version of ESXi as well???....i mean iptables or any such similar in Linux.

Thanks.

How do I change a license# in 5.5?  When I use vSphere client it's telling me I have X number of days left on trial, but I do have a legit license# to plug in.

I got a Problem, getting Connection to my data Storage.

I have a MacPro 6.1, installed ESXi 5.5 on it. <- Works fine, all okay

So on, If I try to configure a new Datastorage to install my Virtual Machines, I get troubles, I cannot find the storage to set it.

I use SanLink2 with Thunderbolt connected in MacPro and Fibre Channel to the Storage (Promise Vtrak 630f)

After I finished configure the Promise, I can see it on my MacPro, but the esxi says theres no Data Storage.

Theres something I have missed?

I Use

ESXi 5.5

MacPro CTO yosemite 10.10.4

Sanlink2

Promise Vtrak 630F

Well, I realy could need some help.

Hi All,

I was patching our ESXi cluster (10 hosts) this week (patching 2 hosts at a time) and I have noticed two instances of linux VMs (one RHEL 5, one RHEL 6) running very slowly after being located on an ESXi that had high load (CPU/Memory in the high 90's).

After relocating the VM off the host (via DRS or manually), the VM still runs very slowly. There is plenty of idle compute capacity (CPU/RAM) on the hosts, and looking at the performance via vCenter shows a VM with ~25% load. Looking within the VM (via munin or TOP) shows extremely high CPU load (~200). I don't see any CPU ready time from outside the VM.

My thoughts are when the VM was on the host with CPU contention, the VM may have slowed down (or throttled the guest vCPU). The issue is the guest has not recovered from this (or reverted back to full performance). My thoughts are along the lines of a laptop with speedstep/power management, that throttles the CPU when running on battery, but runs 100% on AC power.

Rebooting the guest OS returns the VM to full performance.

How can i troubleshoot this/gather evidence/prevent this from happening? with over 600 VMs on this cluster (a blend of Windows and Linux, approx 200 Linux/400 Windows) only 2 VMs have exibited this behaviour.

Regards,

Glynn

I can connect to the host with vShpere client as long as I do it from the the Host itself. I have a 2012 server VM running on the host where I have vSphere client installed and I can connect to host no problem

I get the error when trying to connect to the Host from any other machine except for the host itself. Error is "The client could not send a complete request to the server "192.168.5.249" (The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send.)

Error Stack

Call "ServiceInstance.RetrieveContent" for object "ServiceInstance" on Server "192.168.5.249" failed.

I attached the log.

While upgrading to these releases, need to take care of Known issues of releases very carefully and also we should evaluate any existing client(3rd party, example like monitoring tools) uses SSLv3.

Good tip mentioned is, upgrade VC first and then ESXi due to one of known issues below.

<snip>

You need to update to latest vCenter Server 5.5 Update 3b version and then update to ESXi 5.5 Update 3b

<snip>

Info is @ VMware ESXi 5.5 Update 3b Release Notes

<snip of Release notes>

Miscellaneous Issues

• New ESXi does not get automatically added to vCenter Server inventory
  If you update a previous version of vCenter Server and vSphere Update Manager to ESXi to 5.5 Update 3b, then after remediation task, ESXi does not get automatically added to VC inventory. Remediation process never gets completed and ESXi connection status in VC inventory is shown as disconnected.Workaround: When ESXi is rebooted after remediate process is started, enable SSLv3 on ESXi (which is disabled by default).
  This will make sure ESXi gets added to VC inventory automatically in few minutes and Remediation as completed. For more information refer, KB 2139396

• New Connection failure between ESXi 5.5 Update 3b and View Composer earlier than 6.2 version
  You cannot connect View Composer earlier than 6.2 version to ESXi 5.5 Update 3b in default state.
  
  Workaround: You can enable SSLv3 on ESXi 5.5 Update 3b. For more information refer, KB 2139396

• New Attempts to upgrade ESXi 5.5 Update 3b to ESXi 6.0 Update 1 fails
  Upgrading from ESXi 5.5 Update 3b to ESXi 6.0 Update 1 fails due to XHCI driver dependency conflict. This is issue is observed when you upgrade using a CD-ROM or esxcli method.
  The following ESXCLI command throws upgrade error:
  ~ # esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-6.0.0-20150902001-standard -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore2/update-from-esxi6.0-6.0_update01.zip
  [DependencyError]
  VIB VMware_bootbank_xhci-xhci_1.0-3vmw.550.3.78.3223702 requires com.vmware.usb-9.2.2.0, but the requirement cannot be satisfied within the ImageProfile.
  Please refer to the log file for more details.Workaround: VMware recommends to upgrade the path for ESXi 5.5 Update 3b to ESXi 6.0 Update 1b.

• New Attempts to add an ESXi 5.5 update 3b host to a legacy vCenter Server fails
  Attempts to add ESXi 5.5 U3b host to vCenter Server 5.5 Update 3 or earlier version fails with host communication error in the user interface.
  Workaround: You need to update to latest vCenter Server 5.5 Update 3b version and then update to ESXi 5.5 Update 3b. If you don’t update to vCenter Server 5.5 Update 3b, then you need to enable SSLv3 on ESXi for all services. Enabling SSLv3 on ESXi will cause POODLE vulnerability.For more information refer, KB 2139396

<snip>

This is probably is trivial thing to resolve but I'm just getting acquainted with the Web Client and whenever I right-click anywhere in the web clientm I get that idiotic Adobe Flash popup menu on top of the object's context menu. Is there any way to disable it?

Thanks.