VMware vSphere

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  • 1.  Trying to Fix: Cannot Synchronize Host, I got the error: Waiting for vpxa to Start

    Posted Jun 10, 2020 07:25 PM

    I have a fairly old system running two hosts on 5.5 and a vCenter VM also running 5.5. When I logged into vCenter this morning, all of the VMs were listed as orphaned, with both of the hosts giving a message stating "Configuration Issues, Cannot synchronize host xxxxxx. Cannot contact the specified host xxxxxxx". If I log onto the host directly with the vSphere client, all of the VMs are there and working fine.

    After some googling around, one thread states to right click and disconnect the host then reconnect it in vCenter. It disconnected fine but then when trying to connect, I get an error stating "A general system error occurred: Timed waiting for vpxa to start". I haven't had much luck tracing this one down.

    Any ideas on what I can do to fix it?

    Thanks,

    Brian



  • 2.  RE: Trying to Fix: Cannot Synchronize Host, I got the error: Waiting for vpxa to Start

    Posted Jun 10, 2020 07:34 PM

    First step would be to try restarting the host management agents:

    VMware Knowledge Base

    As a general comment, you really should look to upgrade - even 6.0 is already out of support, never mind 5.5.



  • 3.  RE: Trying to Fix: Cannot Synchronize Host, I got the error: Waiting for vpxa to Start

    Posted Jun 11, 2020 12:38 AM

    Hi there.

    I would suggest to take a look at vpxa logs to see what happend. VPXA is the agent in charge to communicate with vCenter.

    As Scott said, you may restart management services (services.sh restart). You will loose management for two minutes but all VMs will keep running.

    Also, SSH to ESXi hosts and see if the syslog partition is full (df -h)

    Make sure vCenter can resolve DNS without problems, just to make sure it's not DNS :smileyhappy:



  • 4.  RE: Trying to Fix: Cannot Synchronize Host, I got the error: Waiting for vpxa to Start
    Best Answer

    Posted Jun 11, 2020 03:58 PM

    Thanks guys. In looking into the management agents, we saw some stuff about old snapshots causing issues. We don't normally use snapshots in our office but when we checked, about a third of the VMs had 'old' snapshots from Veeam runs. It took the rest of yesterday to get those cleaned out. This morning, vCenter was back to normal again. We did a database clean up on the vCenter machine as well as we were getting a database error when trying to reconnect with the host that was disconnected yesterday in attempt to solve the issue and that fixed it right up.

    Yes, there are plans in works to upgrade the system to the latest and greatest. Trust me, it can't come fast enough for me.

    Thanks again,

    Brian