Host randomly disconnecting and reconnecting itself

[bshubinsky]

Seems that I've stumbled upon a weird problem. Randomly throughout the day our two hosts are disconnecting and reconnecting themselves. The period between the disconnect and reconnect are about 1-2 seconds in length and are not actually interfering with the VMs. I can't seem to pinpoint why this is happening. We are running ESXi 4.1.

I've attached some screenshots. Any help would be much appreciated.

[Troy_Clavell]

have you tried to add the ESXi Host(s) in question into your vCenter inventory as FQDN instead of IP? Also, ensure you have proper name resolution setup between vCenter, your ESXi Hosts and vice versa.

[bshubinsky]

I have made sure that name resolution is set up properly. I'll try adding them with their FQDN and see if that fixes the problem.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Do you get a disconnect if you're directly connected to the host with the vSphere client? Anything in the logs on the host?




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[bshubinsky]

I tried adding the host by FQDN but it wouldn't let me. Would this be the cause? I don't see why I wouldn't be able to talk to the machine using the FQDN but with the IP it's perfectly fine in our current setup.

Quick edit: I logged in via SSH into the hosts and verified that I could ping other items on our domain via the FQDN, including the vCenter server and the DNS servers. I'm able to ping the hosts via IP but not FQDN from the outside. I'm obviously missing something, what could it be?

[Troy_Clavell]

I tried adding the host by FQDN but it wouldn't let me.

Can you elaborate on this? Error message? You are sure name resolution is working? You use DNS or how is name resolution setup in your environment? Can you connect directly to the ESXi Host using FQDN?

[bshubinsky]

Figured out why. Needed to manually add the name record to DNS. I can access it via FQDN now. Gonna make the change later and see if it fixes the problem.

[f10]

If you have a small environment then you may edit the /etc/hosts file in the ESX server, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003735 for more information.

If the issue persists it would be nice to see the /var/log/vmware/hostd.log to check the sequence of events during that time.

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f10

VCP3,VCP4,HP UX CSA

[Xeonel]

From your statement in your quick edit above I'd say your hosts are not properly configured in DNS.

If you can only ping them via IP from other machines and not by using their FQDN hostnames, then you need to double check that your hosts have proper forward and reverse entries in DNS.

[MattG]

Is vCenter at 4.1 as well? The disconnecting hosts issue happens with ESX 4.1 hosts connecting to 4.0 vCenter.

-MattG

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[bshubinsky]

Yes vCenter is at 4.1