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hokiedude
Contributor
Contributor

"Virtual Machine Heartbeat Failed on serverXXX changed from Green to Yellow" every 2 seconds

Any ideas here? We are getting this on all vm's every 2 seconds and it's flooding the VC event log. We are at ESX 4.0.0 build-219385 across the board, vmware tools are updated and we are experiencing no issues with the actual vm's themselves.

We have 12 IBM 7995 Blades running ESX at the same version and patch level and all 12 have the repeat events. It always says from Green to Yellow or Yellow to Green.

Alarm Virtual Machine Heartbeat Failed' on serverXXX

changed from Green to Yellow

info

2/3/2010 10:35:12 AM

Thank you in advance.

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7 Replies
kesparlat
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

The VM heartbeat is given by vmware tools to Hypervisor, this heartbat is a number that changes every second. If you don't have tools installed, you should install them. In other ocasions is possible that your physical server be occuped and don't give response at time.

I suggest you to install Vmware tools on every VM, and to change the value in the vCenter alarms.

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hokiedude
Contributor
Contributor

I do have vmware tools installed on every machine.

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danm66
Expert
Expert

This has been seen since VC 2.5 and no real fix. there's a setting to set the delay to a longer span, but that usually doesn't help much. Hosts with high cpu/memory usage seem to trigger this false alarm more often. try increasing service console memory and decreasing load or disable the alarm until they get a good fix out for this. If you can't find the configuration to increase the delay, let me know and I'll try and find the doc for you.

krowczynski
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Hi,

also have the problem after upgrading from 2.5 to 4.

My monitoring software gives me the alert a lot of times a day.






MCP, VCP

MCP, VCP3 , VCP4
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hokiedude
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks, I will search for the doc. I have rebooted the ESX Server and placed 1 VM on the host and it still happens. So this is certainly a "feature" that I hope vmware resolves soon.

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iremembercpm
Contributor
Contributor

In lieu of a real fix, how about a way to prevent these logs being written to /var/log/vmware/hostd-log.. I am getting a yellow and a green alarm for each vm guest every minute. it didn't start until the upgrade this morning to ESXi 4.0.0, 219382.

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mcdaidh
Contributor
Contributor

I had a similar problem caused by a setting that was missing in the config.xml file on the ESX server. To correct this issue, connect to the console of your ESX server and edit the following file. I used vi to edit the fle.

/etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml

look for the section <vmsvc> </vmsvc>, it will probably be empty. It should look like this.

<vmsvc>

<enabled>true</enabled>

<heartbeatCheckInSecs> 30 </heartbeatCheckInSecs>

</vmsvc>

Save the file then restart the management agent using the following command. This will not effect any running VMs, but you will see you host disconnect from vCenter and reconnect.

service mgm-vmware restart

Regards,

Hugh

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