CIM Server Service (sfcbd-watchdog) appears to crash and cannot be started

[Rocky2000]

Hi,

I have ESXi 5.5 - we monitor the hardware using the Health Status under Configuration Tab. Every day nearly the hardware items in this list show up as unknown and we have to restart the CIM Server service to get them to work again.

If I try to restart or stop the sfcbd-watchdog service in the shell it gives this error:

~ # /etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog stop

sh: can't kill pid 16788485: No such process

~ # /etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog restart

sh: bad number

sh: you need to specify whom to kill

and yet after I restart the management agents these commands work without error.

I wanted to set up a scheduled task cron in the ESXi shell to restart the management agents every morning and I was wondering if this was ok or if anyone can see any problems that might arise.

[brunofernandez1]

have a look on those logs:

/var/log/syslog.log

/var/log/vmkernel.log

You should find some errors when the cim deamon is killed

but creating cron job should be ok for restarting the service

[Rocky2000]

Hi thank you for your reply.

How do you use cron in esxi or is there another way to schedule a management agents restart that you know of?

[brunofernandez1]

here you go:

VMware KB: Gathering esxtop performance data at specific times using crontab