ESXi 5.5 hosts randomly exit maintenance mode after a reboot

[jhirsh]

Hey Community,

Has anyone run into this? I haven't found much else by the way of "me too", but I've seen this happen on multiple occasions across different clusters. For whatever reason, occasionally when a host reboots while in maintenance mode, the host automatically exits maintenance mode upon reboot. When it occurs, the task is initiated by "System".

Very annoying.. especially if you're trying to stage multiple changes that require a reboot in between..

-Joshua

[rwuellner]

Joshua—

The only time I've seen this happen is if the host has lost connectivity to the device backing the boot filesystem (which does seem to happen randomly in vSphere 5.5).  In this case the host doesn't write back that it was put into maintenance mode, so when it reboots it behaves as if there were a power failure and immediately exits maintenance mode once it's back up.  This may not be applicable in your case, but I thought I would share.

Good luck!

Ryan W.