ESX disconnected but VM’s still running?
November 4th, 2008 . by DaveOn more than one occasion has VMware lead to to near fatal heart attacks and one of those times which pops it head up every few months is the ol’ ESX appears disconnected in VirtualCenter but the VM’s running on it are still working fine. If you don’t use VirtualCenter then you can’t connect to it directlt via the VIclient.
Times like this you assume HA might just kick in, or maybe you should simply reboot the machine and tell everyone it was a hardware failure. Well there’s no need. Generally whats happened here is the management service has crashed resulted in you good people not being able to connect. But its generally safe to say that everything else on the host is running fine.
Solution: Log into the service console and type:
service mgmt-vmware restart
service vmware-vpxa restart
Sometimes the mgmt-vmware service can take a few minutes to restart, try to resist the urge to control+c while the service is stopping. Once restarted go back to VirtualCenter and wait, and wait, and wait. It can take 2-4 minutes before the host magically appears back again.