For the past 9 months our ESX 4.0 and ESXi 4.0 hosts continue to disconnect from vCenter server about every 2 weeks. I initially thought this was due to the amount of traffic over the management vmnics. There was previously a single vSwitch with two vmnics that passed traffic for management, iSCSI, NFS and vMotion. During a recent outage the only way I could get the hosts to come back online was to disconnect the vmk interfaces disabling any and all iSCSI, NFS, and vMotion traffic.
The most recent outage had none of these factors in place. I had a single vSwitch with a vMotion portgroup mapped to two vmnics and a management portgroup mapped to it's dedicated vmnic with one of the vMotion vmnics as a standby for backup. Even with this setup all three of our hosts eventually went down again, requiring a reboot to fix. We're now focusing on vCenter and whether or not the vpxa packages on it are corrupt. Before this was all going on we attempted to upgrade vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 and had to revert back to a snapshot due to complications; the local SQL Express was running the database. Since this upgrade attempt and snapshot revert is when these issues began to occur.
Our plans now are to do a clean install of vCenter 4.1 to replace our vCenter 4.0 and at the same time create a new database. Does this seem too extreme as a fix? In my mind the vpxa packages local to our current vCenter server may be corrupt because when we try to reconnect vCenter to the ESX/ESXi hosts is seems to have an issue after I supply a username and password to the hosts. I'm assuming this is the point when vCenter attempts to install the vpxa package and fails. Would appreciate a sanity check on all this.
