VM Monitoring functions (in vSphere HA 5.0) just don't work !

[nguyenquangminh]

Hi everyone,

VM monitoring (a function of HA) does not work. I just disable the VMware Tools service in a VM, and ESXi 5.0 reports that VMware Tools is currently not running for this VM, means that there's no VMware Tools heartbeat (between VM and host), but the VM is not restarted after a pre-set time.

In production, there are some cases when end-users' VMs became not responding, even with blue screen, but there were no auto-restarts at all as it should --> this function is advertised and configured to do just that, but it does not work at all.

Of course Application monitoring, which goes beyond the capability of VMware Tools and needs 3rd-party application-aware agents, also does not work.

So my question is that, whether there must be something that must be enabled/configured to make it work, or it is just a bug, or a poor introduction in case of application monitoring ???

Please advise me.

Thanks a lot,

Minh

[vmroyale]

Hello and welcome to the communities.

Note: Discussion successfully moved from VMware ESXi 5 to Availability: HA & FT

[admin]

Simply stopping VMware Tools will not trigger the vm monitoring response because HA also checks to see if the guest is performing disk or network IO (see page 28 in the availability guide - http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-availab...). There should be a response if the guest blue screens since in that case IO should (eventually) stop. I suggest filing an SR if this problem is reproducible.

Elisha

[depping]

My article explains this: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/06/05/vm-monitoring-only-using-vmware-tools-heartbeat/