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VMWare ESXi - Hardware monitoring - vSphere host disconnected


Recently a client of mine experienced a sudden disconnect of one of their hosts from vSphere Client. A quick check quickly confirmed that the VMs were still running happily along, however the host was "tagged" as disconnected. Forcing a reconnect did not work, so it was time to get my hands dirty and start digging. 

 I connected to the host in question with SSH and changed directory to the location of the syslog files (you do store your logs on a SAN disk right and not on a local drive?). After some quick searches I noticed this entry in the hostd.log file:


2012-12-24T19:01:01.309Z [FFFC2B90 info 'VmkVprobSource'] VmkVprobSource::Post event: (vim.event.EventEx) {
-->    dynamicType = <unset>,
-->    key = 1348822881,
-->    chainId = 761820257,
-->    createdTime = "1970-01-01T00:00:00Z",
-->    userName = "",
-->    datacenter = (vim.event.DatacenterEventArgument) null,
-->    computeResource = (vim.event.ComputeResourceEventArgument) null,
-->    host = (vim.event.HostEventArgument) {
-->       dynamicType = <unset>,
-->       name = "nameofesxhost.local",
-->       host = 'vim.HostSystem:ha-host',
-->    },
-->    vm = (vim.event.VmEventArgument) null,
-->    ds = (vim.event.DatastoreEventArgument) null,
-->    net = (vim.event.NetworkEventArgument) null,
-->    dvs = (vim.event.DvsEventArgument) null,
-->    fullFormattedMessage = <unset>,
-->    changeTag = <unset>,
-->    eventTypeId = "esx.problem.visorfs.inodetable.full",
-->    severity = <unset>,
-->    message = <unset>,
-->    arguments = (vmodl.KeyAnyValue) [
-->       (vmodl.KeyAnyValue) {
-->          dynamicType = <unset>,
-->          key = "1",
-->          value = "tmp:/auto-backup.17245931/etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key",
-->       },
-->       (vmodl.KeyAnyValue) {
-->          dynamicType = <unset>,
-->          key = "2",
-->          value = "tar",
-->       }
-->    ],
-->    objectId = "ha-eventmgr",
-->    objectType = "vim.HostSystem",
-->    objectName = <unset>,
-->    fault = (vmodl.MethodFault) null,
--> }
2012-12-24T19:01:01.326Z [FFFC2B90 info 'ha-eventmgr'] Event 46 : The root filesystem's file table is full.  As a result, the file tmp:/auto-backup.17245931/etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key could not be created by the application 'tar'.

This made me suspect that a volume was running out of space. Some quick commands later (vdf -h and stat -f /) showed that sufficient space and inodes was available. Google to the rescue as I search for "esx.problem.visorfs.inodetable.full" the following article from VMWare popped up:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2037798

Apparently the hardware monitoring service (sfcbd) is flooding the /var/run/sfcb directory with files (>5000) and creating the problem. Now you could just do a /etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog stop, delete the files in /var/run/sfcb and then run /etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog start, however I logged in on the console of the host in question and did a full restart management agent. That did the trick.
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