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sean0xb8
Contributor
Contributor

Hardware - Health Status Monitoring - CIM - alarm/error - "Cannot access the hardware monitoring service"

Problem:

Our vCenter reports back that it "Cannot access the hardware monitoring service" when we click on the Hardware Status tab.

Setup:

-- two vsphere hosts running ESXi 5.1.

-- vCenter on a third machine running Windows 2008R2

-- All three machines are on the same network and subnet



Verified:

-- from vCenter, I verified that CIM Server service is running by checking Configuration (Tab) -> Security Profile -> Services

-- also from vCenter, I checked firewall setting by looking Configuration (Tab) -> Security Profile -> Firewall; according to the Firewall page, the CIM Server service runs on both TCP ports 5988 and 5989 -- but this may not mean anything because vCenter source port might be different from 5988 or 5989


Troubleshooting attempts:

-- restarted CIM Server service



Known issues:

-- checked and determined that for both ESXi hosts, port 5989 is open but 5988 is closed

-- ran wireshark packet capture on vCenter - I checked and determined that no TCP packets target port 5989 nor 5988 on the ESXi hosts from vCenter server



Question:

I would appreciate help on how to proceed forward.

1. I figure I want to open up port 5988 on the ESXi hosts - how can I do this?

2. Is there a CIM Client on vCenter that I need to check - to see if it is running?



Thanks,

Sean


21 Replies
ahautomation
Contributor
Contributor

Very old thread, but i am running into the same issue.

Running 6.5.0u2

Or monitoring software needs to connect to 5988 (removed ip-adresses from following). 

Test-NetConnection 192.168.x.x -Port 5988
WARNING: TCP connect to (192.168.x.x : 5988) failed

Firewall is allowed, CIMServer is running, also tried to disable firewall. 

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ahautomation
Contributor
Contributor

SHH into the ESXI-host.

vi /etc/sfcb/sfcb.cfg

here you will see: httpLocalOnly is set to true, change it to false

/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog restart

and the port should be open. 

I found that this will not be able in future ESXI versions. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/82638

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