Hopefully there is a fairly simple explanation to this but first some back story:
I have been running this ESXi host for nearly 4 months. This is a home lab but it does run my personal Exchange server, and I would prefer to not break that...
Recently, (a month ago) I installed 3 new quests on this host, and enables Hypervisor in the Server's BIOS in order to run 64bit OSes. The 3 servers consist of 2 domain controllers and 1 exchange server. All of the other servers are original and 32 bit (though my old domain controllers have been deleted as there was no need to keep them around. Up until a week ago, everything was running fine with no issues.
Lately (over the last week) the ESXi host has started slowing down, and altogether acting slow and it does not seem to matter what I am trying to do at the time. If I try to shut down a guest, it sits for anywhere between 30 and 120 seconds (I have seen if go up near 5 minutes) before it throws an error:
Call "PropertyCollector.RetrieveContents" for object "ha-property-collector" on ESXi "192.168.0.242" failed.
This will pop up if I edit a guests memory, CPUs, CD-ROM content, restart, power off, view a datastore, restart the host, shutdown the host.... etc. There seems to be nothing in common with what I try to do when I receive the message.
My first thought was just that the host was over taxed. That does not appear to be the issue as the issue occurs even when all guests are powered off.
Current setup:
HP ProLiant DL140 G3 with 2x Quad 1.86GHz procs.
8GB RAM
2x 500GB 7200RPM drives (esxtop and wathcing the drive throughput and I/O does not seem to be a problem).
Host is running 4.1.0 build-348481
Each drive is it's own datastore. There are 2 servers on each Datastore.
DC1 - 1GB RAM, 20GB disk, 2cpu
DC2 - 1GB RAM, 20GB disk, 2cpu
Exchange - 2GB Ram, 100GB disk, 2cpu
MiscServer (rarely used) - 1GB RAM, 2x 40GB drives (separate datastores), 1 cpu.
I am open to any suggestions.
