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7 Replies Last post: Jan 23, 2010 9:59 PM by danm66  

vmware-vpxa restart posted: Jan 3, 2008 11:05 AM

Click to view virtual Vic's profile Enthusiast 45 posts since
Oct 23, 2006

What will "vmware-vpxa restart" do?

I have a host with some VMs on it that is part of an VI3 cluster. It stopped communicating so I tried to reconnect the host via Virtual Center. This failed. I logged in to the host via Putty and did the service mgmt-vmware restart but still I could not reconnect the host in Virtual Center. The VMs are live on the host and no network settings have been changed. My question is, will running vmware-vpxa restart kill the VMs on that host?

Thanks

-Vic

Re: vmware-vpxa restart

1. Jan 3, 2008 11:10 AM in response to: virtual Vic
Click to view fordian's profile Hot Shot 314 posts since
Mar 20, 2006
Hello,

vmware-vpxa is installed only when connected to VC. To date I never had any problems when restarting this service. VMs stay alive and working because VMs do not depend directly from VC but from the ESX Server.

I think you can even stop this service without causing any damages on VMs.

Thank you

Dominic

Re: vmware-vpxa restart

2. Jan 3, 2008 11:13 AM in response to: virtual Vic
Click to view jayolsen's profile Master 561 posts since
Jul 31, 2006

Might check the last entry in this post, sounds similiar. xinetd service restart

http://communities.vmware.com/message/828264#828264

Re: vmware-vpxa restart

3. Jan 3, 2008 11:34 AM in response to: jayolsen
Click to view bvdkolk's profile Novice 8 posts since
Feb 14, 2006
Had this problem with a older esx (2.5.2) host, in that case the server was running out of diskspace.. can check this with the 'df -h' or 'vdf -h' command

Re: vmware-vpxa restart

5. Jan 7, 2009 1:28 PM in response to: virtual Vic
Click to view SKGeorge's profile Novice 2 posts since
Jan 4, 2008

service mgmt-vmware restart
service vmware-vpxa restart

Will not kill your running VMs. If you are trying to Re-sync with the VC, stop the VC service (on the server running VirtualCenter), restart these 2 services and then start the VC service. We have found that this will normally re-sync the ESX host with the VC.

Re: vmware-vpxa restart

6. Jan 23, 2010 9:00 PM in response to: SKGeorge
Click to view Western0's profile Lurker 4 posts since
Jan 11, 2009

After the restart you will have to reconnect the host in VC (it will be greyed out).

There was a bug after an update to ESX 3.5 where restarting mgmt-vmware (pretty sure it was this and not vpxa) would reboot the VMs. This was a bug and it was resolved in a subsequent update.

Re: vmware-vpxa restart

7. Jan 23, 2010 9:59 PM in response to: SKGeorge
Click to view danm66's profile Expert 354 posts since
Oct 27, 2006

the only service restart that MIGHT cause a VM problem is mgmt-vmware if you have an older release of 3.5 or before, or you have Automatic Startup/Shutdown enabled on the host.

verify that you can use the VI (or vsphere) client to connect directly to the host (use host IP/name in address field and root for username). this goes directly to the host so vpxa's status doesn't matter. If you can login this way, you can manage your vm's (but no vmotion as that's a vc function) and then you can narrow down the possibible problem causes. If you can't get in this way, then hostd(mgmt-vmware) isn't staying running, the watchdog is confused or there is an issue preventing hostd from operating properly.

You can check the first two possibilities by running 'ps -ef|grep hostd', if you only get back the process for grep hostd then you probably need to delete the watchdog PID file. If it is running, check /var/log/vmkwarning and vmkernel for errors. Usually it's storage related problems that cause this.

HTH

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