ESXi host not responding

In my experience troubleshooting is a challenging task especially when it comes to Production case because each second count .There are lot of things to check before identifying the real root cause which if you do not manage proper can waste lot of time. I made below a simple route to find the root cause without wasting much time. Keep reading in case your esxi host seems not responding

1. Verify that the esxi host in a powered on state(really are you kidding me Jobi ?)
2. Are you able to ping between esxi host and vCenter server managed IP and vice versa using IP and FQDN?
3. Putty esxi host and check hostd process status ( /etc/init.d/hostd status)
4. Check if all storage is connected to esxi and in active state (Even a  single storage LUN inactive state can be the root cause so make sure to check this point)
   ESXi hosts can disconnect from vCenter Server due to underlying storage issues
5. Check vCenter server agent (vpxa agent) responding on affected host ?
6. Try to reconnect the host
7. Restart management agents on the host
   /etc/init.d/hostd restart
   /etc/init.d/vpxa restart
   Try following command to restart all management agents (Be prepared for esxi restart)
   services.sh restart
8. Finally verify if esxi hosts experienced a Purple screen of death(PSOD)

Issue #1

Issue #2

This is an interesting error I saw while adding new datastores on an esxi. My host suddently got disconnected as well as the VMs connected. When I checked the host host console I saw the attached error “hostd detected to be non-responsive”

First I checked if there is any issue on the datastores itselft .Did not find anything

I connected the host via putty and checked hostd status .Service was running

But thanks to my mentor, he said may be the service is hanged and just showing as running. He suggested me to restart management services. Issue got resolved after issuing following commands

/etc/init.d/hostd restart
/etc/init.d/vpxa restart

Thanks for reading

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