Host in not responsing state

[sumit_vmw]

Hello Team,

One of ESXi host is in not responding state in vcenter.

we have three host cluster.

There are VM running on all the three host .

Now, we need to shutdown esxhost2  for h/w activity.?

How can I move VM from esxhost2 as this host will not go in maintenance state , nor vmotion will work

as esxhost is " disconnected from  vcenter"

any idea to minimise downtime ?

Regards

Sumit

[vFouad]

Hi,

This doesn't sound ESXi on ARM specific... but...

1) you could try restart hostd and vpxa services on the host. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1003490

That may get the host to reconnect to VC...

2) If not, you can power off and unregister the VM's using cli and then register them back and power on on the remaining hosts... this will result in a controlled down time...

3) Assuming you have HA enabled on your cluster; if you reboot the host anyway; the VMs will get failed over and powered on to a new host when that host goes down, this is less of a controlled outage, but the VM movement and power on should be automated...

I hope one of the 3 options helps...

vFouad

[cyprienlaplace]

Hi Sumit,

I'm not a specialist of vCenter, but have you tried to reconnect the host to vCenter? I do that with right click on the host -> connection -> (re)connect.

Cyprien

[sumit_vmw]

Hello,

Thank you for the response.

I already tried  restarting agent and it didnot  help.

even manual connect didnot work .

I noticed that esxcli commands are not responding on esxi hosts  and there are storage related errors in logs.

So, we need to being down the host.

vcenter HA is not configured 

Regards

Sumit

[rajesharihant]

what if you restart the vCenter server appliance?!

[Ahmedkhalaf]

Try to disconnect and remove from the inventory of the vCenter then added again this should not impact any VM or the host it self

[stadi13]

Hi @Ahmedkhalaf 

If you are unable to connect to the host and cannot restart vpxa agents, you will not be able to move the VMs to another host. You will have to shut down the VMs from guest side and reboot the host afterwards.

Sorry for the bad news.

Daniel

[ptarnawski]

Hey @sumit_vmw 

Before reboot, 

What is the error message once you try to reconnect the host? Do you have a Lockdown mode on? IF so it will prevent hosts to reconnect. You need to go to the console via iDrac/ILO/CMCI and disable it. 

Also, try manually resetting vpxa:

Log in to ESXi Shell or SSH as root

/etc/init.d/hostd restart

/etc/init.d/vpxa restart

OR restart all management services:

services.sh restart

If none of the above helped then the only way to recover is hosts reboot and you will get downtime. There is no way to vMotion VMs if hosts is not connected to vCenter.