VMware Cloud Community
Newb449
Contributor
Contributor
‎10-05-2010 05:48 AM

ESXi4 host shows VMs as not running when they are

I've had a crash and my VCenter server is not running. When I log on to the host using the root credentials it shows all the VMs as "not running". The problem is they are running. I can ping and rdp to the VMs.

Why is this being misreported?

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9 Replies
wdbarker
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎10-05-2010 06:26 AM

You can restart the services and it should report correctly. This does not hurt the running VMs. The console will do it, or you can TSM /sbin/services.sh restart. The Clients will reconnect and usually show valid status.

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Newb449
Contributor
Contributor
‎10-05-2010 02:38 PM

I restarted the management agents and now all the VMs are gone! They all show a status of "unkown (invalid)"

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Newb449
Contributor
Contributor
‎10-05-2010 02:38 PM

I restarted the management agents and now all the VMs are gone! They all show a status of "unkown (invalid)"

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wdbarker
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎10-05-2010 02:50 PM

unknown (invalid) means the underlying storage is not visible. It's usually still there, just not showing up. Try a Configuration / Storage Adapters / Rescan and look for your storage. It's got to be there for the machines to be visible. Whatever has made your storage not visible probably is responsable for the state being reported incorrectly. I'm assuming the machines are still running, so there is no immediate need to try the tfs (Three-Finger-Salute or reboot, for the non-Windoze types).

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Newb449
Contributor
Contributor
‎10-05-2010 02:55 PM

I can see my datastores. I re-scanned my hba anyway and I can still see my storage but the VMs are still showng up as unknown invalid Smiley Sad

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Newb449
Contributor
Contributor
‎10-05-2010 02:55 PM

I can see my datastores. I re-scanned my hba anyway and I can still see my storage but the VMs are still showng up as unknown invalid Smiley Sad

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wdbarker
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎10-05-2010 02:59 PM

I'm not certain about this next suggestion, but hopefully there is a less important machine you can try it on. Since you can see the datastore, browse to a .vmx file and "Add to Inventory". It should come in correctly and be accessable normally. If so, Add the rest and delete all the Unknowns's. If not, I'm out of ideas.

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Newb449
Contributor
Contributor
‎10-05-2010 03:02 PM

I might concentrate my efforts on getting my VC Server back first and see what I see first. The VMs are running and that's the important thing.

To be continued.....

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Newb449
Contributor
Contributor
‎10-05-2010 03:02 PM

I might concentrate my efforts on getting my VC Server back first and see what I see first. The VMs are running and that's the important thing.

To be continued.....

Got my VC Server going again and my hosts and VMs are ok. I had a loo at the root login again and there are no VM associated with the host at all. There's entries in task list about unregistering virtual machines.

Not sure what's goign on here but I think there's something fundamentally wrong with access to the hos directly!

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