Category: VMware

Hardware Monitoring on This Host is Not Responding

I received the following error this morning on my vCenter server after a brief reboot for a few Windows updates:

Hardware Monitoring on This Host is Not Responding

This error is generated when I click on the Hardware Status tab on each Host. I went to Plugins -> Manage Plugins disabled and re-enabled to no avail.

Came across this post at VMware Communities. Looked at half the suggestions and came to one indicating to restart the VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices.

Set Ambient Temperature Alarm VMware ESX Host

I had some temperature spikes in the data center recently that caused havoc and for some reason I never received notifications.  I guess this isn’t configured to email by default, rather it sends a trap.
To change this behavior so that I can get escalating notifications when temperature dramatically spikes, you can modify it to do so.
Go to the Alarms for the vCenter server root domain and double-click on Host Hardware Temperature Status:
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In the settings for this, you want to change the action (click on Action tab) to send email notification.  I send to my email as well as SMS:
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You can always check out what the temperature is of your ESX host by going to the ESX host in vCenter and clicking on Hardware Status tab and expanding Front Panel Board Ambient Temp (or similar depending on your hardware):
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vSphere Client: Disable Getting Started Tabs

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In vSphere Client 4.1, it is documented that to disable the Getting Started tab of VMs, you go to Edit -> Client Settings and untick Show Getting Started Tabs as noted below:

You can disable the Getting Started tabs if you do not want to display them.

You can disable the tabs in the following ways.

Procedure
■
 Click the Close Tab link to disable Getting Started tabs for the type of object selected.
■

Change the vSphere Client settings to hide all Getting Started tabs.

a
 Select Edit > Client Settings.
b
 Select the General tab.
c
 Deselect the Show Getting Started Tabs check box and click OK.
However, mine was already unchecked – so I checked it, clicked OK, then went back into settings and unchecked it.
NOW the Getting Started Tabs are disabled.  =)

VMware VirtualCenter Service will not start

VMware VirtualCenter Service will not start.
The VMware VirtualCenter Server service terminated with service-specific error The system cannot find the file specified..

I found that this is because IIS Admin and World Wide Web publishing service was installed on the vCenter Server.
Stop and disable these services, then start VMware VirtualCenter Server.
Errors from Eventvwr: