Loss of access to ESXi 4.1 host

[dftcomm]

I appear to have run into a problem with our VMWare setup.  I attempted to call VMWare's support but the hold times are atrocious and I have yet to receive a call back.  I need an answer asap so I can get things working properly, so I hope someone can guide me to a resolution!  We are currently running 1 ESXi 4.1 host with 2 Virtual Servers, and my supervisor was having problems connecting to the console on his workstation.  We decided to shut down the VMs and reboot the server.  After doing so our Vcenter server can no longer connect to the Host machine.  Ping also does not work from the vcenter server.

I have the same symptoms from my laptop.  However from my Boss's computer he can both ping and connect to the host directly.  There is nothing on my network that should be blocking access to the server, so I am wondering if there is some kind of access control list on the VMWare host that is causing this problem?

I hope I have provided enough detail, if any further clarification is needed, please ask!

Thanks

~Matt

[vmroyale]

Hello.

Are you pinging by name or IP?  Is DNS in order?

Good Luck!

[weinstein5]

are you and your boss on the same subnet? Can you ping the gateway on the ESXi subnet?

[dftcomm]

All Pings have been done by IP - so I don't think that DNS should be an issue.

All computers that I have attempted to ping or connect from are indeed on the same subnet, same configuration.

Hope that helps.

[dftcomm]

Note - just to add - from my Boss's computer I can ping the IP directly and it responds, as well as connect using the viclient.  So something is differing between our machines.

The Vcenter server is windows server 2008 R2 and my laptop is windows 7.  My Boss's computer is Vista as is one of the other machines that can ping successfully.  I also was able to ping successfully from a windows XP machine.

There were no windows updates installed today on my machine that should have had an impact like this - so this is really confusing me.  It seems like something on the host is rejecting my MAC possibly?

~Matt

[ccRichard]

When I have certain iscsi target/ LUN go down, I cannot access my esxi through vcenter. Are you sure all your data stores are up and connected?

Also, what has changed since this was working?

[dftcomm]

That's what is odd about the whole thing.  I will elaborate that I did make changes and set up secondary NICs for both my LAN and SAN yesterday.  Everything was working fine until the reboot of the server earlier this morning.

The confusing thing to me is the inability to ping from some PCs in my network.

I did some testing and plugged into my supervisor's LAN drop and specified his IP and I still am unable to ping from my laptop.  I have tested various machines throughout my network and some can ping it and some cannot - all different OSs, all on different switches throughout the network.  Access to the virtual machines that are running is just fine, but the ability to ping the host itself is what I have been testing.

I am still trying to troubleshoot but coming up empty handed.

[fraber01]

Make sure there's nothing on the client blocking you from connecting to the host.  double check the windows firewall (disable it to be sure).

on the server, can you ping your computer?

try to trace your packets (traceroute)...

[ccRichard]

Is there any way you can change your network settings back to what it was when it worked?

[rcaldeira]

How many uplinks your management networt have? What is load balance policy for your management interface?

I had a problem that the one uplink went down and up, the host change the management network to other uplink, but one physical swith didn't learn the new MAC address path in its CAM table.

Than I change my load balance policy for the management interface to "explicit failover" and configured my uplink 1 to active and 2 to passive, but only for management interface.

I don't know if your case is the same, but you can try.

[dftcomm]

I was finally able to get in touch with VMWare support.  Apparently for some reason after rebooting the server my VMKernel was set to different policy exceptions - this caused havoc with the Etherchannel I had setup on our switch!

Everything is working properly now - thanks everyone for the input.