ESXi disconnecting right after connecting

This morning was just one of those mornings! Got up, checked my phone, 22 alerts from vCops. Damnit 🙁

So got into work and could see that it was centralized around two server rooms located close to each other utilizing the same uplinks to our core network. I suspected a network error at first. Talk to a guy in networking, “Oh, didn’t you know? There was a planned power outage in that area”. Oh that explains it. Debugging further showed that only networks were affected by power interruption. Servers and storage continued to run.

So I suspected that the reason the hosts were still not responding was that they had been with out network for 4-6 hours. Chose to reconnect which worked.. at first. Immediatly after connecting the hosts disconnected again. This happened with all of them. Strange.

I remembered then an KB article I saw a while back: ESXi/ESX host disconnects from vCenter Server 60 seconds after connecting

Aahh so port 902 might be blocked. Checked – Nope. Open both on TCP and UDP. Hmm. Aahh perhaps I need to restart the management agents but SSH was disabled. So connect the old C# client to one of the hosts directly. Enable SSH. Still no, network was filtering port 22. So no avail. Beginning to panic a bit PowerCLI came to mind. Perhaps there is a way to restart the management agents from PowerCLI.

There is! Here. But not all of them though as far as I could tell. So I tried restarting the vpxa service. Which luckily worked.

So a lot of clean up of the configurations are in order now. Personal todo: 1) allow SSH from management networks to the hosts. 2) Fix/Get access to iLO/Drac/IMPI of the hosts. 3) Get answers why I was not informed about the power work being done. And a bonus too. Need to figure out why all of the 8 hosts spread on 3 clusters have access to a 20 MB LUN that no one knows about and that while the vpxa services on 5 hosts was not working two hosts complained that they had lost access to that specific LUN.

Work work work.

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