esxi host keeps disconnecting at random

[dirtdevil01]

When I connect through vcenter with the vic, my esxi host randomly disconnects on it's own. The icon for the server is a red triangle and it only says "host connection power state" which is weird because the vm that vcenter is installed on is hosted on the esxi server that it keeps disconnecting. This started to happen shortly after I joined vcenter to a windows domain. vcenter is installed on windows server 2008 R2.

[gekko]

Try to disconnect (not remove) and then re-connect it to vCenter.

If that does not help, you could disconnect and remove it, but you will lose performance data and annotations on the VM´s on the host ..

And the Windows Firewall on vCenter hasn´t been turned on by a domain policy or something like that?

- Kenth

[morrisosu]

We are having this same problem after upgrading to vSphere 4.1 U1.  vCenter is at U1 levels and the ESXi host is as well.  At first we saw the random host connection power state issue and now we have ESXi hosts randomly disconnecting.  When we try to reconnect it fails with a "A general system error occurred: internal error: vmodl.fault.HostCommunication".

No firewalls are on and vCenter is running on 2008 R2 as well.

Any ideas?

Shane

[dirtdevil01]

I solved it on my own. The reason why it kept screwing up was because of a few things...

1. My dns server was really screwed up and since I would connect my esxi boxes by hostname to vcenter, every now and then when it would resolve the hosts, it would break.

2. vcenter was installed on a windows xp pro vm. I re-installed on a windows server 2008 R2 vm and it cleared up the rest of the issues.

[idle-jam]

glad things has being sorted at your end. most of the time it would probably be the DNS server.

[morrisosu]

I wish it would have been DNS but unfortunately that’s not the case with our setup.  I ended up opening an SR and VMware has admitted it’s a bug that relates to the distributed vSwitch (not the Nexus 1k but the VMware dVS).  I am currently awaiting a response from their engineering team.  I will post any info I receive.

Thanks for everyone’s input!

Shane

[dirtdevil01]

Yeah, that wasn't the case with me. I was using 1 server with a standard vswitch.