Virtual Machine Guest reboot alarm trigger does not function if virtual machine is rebooted from within Guest OS

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• A custom alarm is created in vCenter Server with the Guest reboot trigger
• The alarm is triggered when a virtual machine with this alarm is restarted from the vSphere Client using the Restart Guest option.
• The alarm is not triggered if the Guest OS is shutdown or restarted from within the virtual machine, (for Windows, Start > Shutdown > Restart and for Linux, reboot or init 6)
  

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 4.1.x
VMware vCenter Server 4.0.x

Resolution

The Guest reboot alarm trigger will only pick up on virtual machine restarts that are initiated from the vSphere Client or via an API call. If the Guest OS is rebooted from within the operating system, the ESX host and vCenter Server cannot detect this and hence cannot trigger an alarm. You may use a third party management utility to monitor these types of events.

Additional Information

The alarm trigger, VM powered off will pick up on a guest OS shutdown (not reboot) initiated from within the guest OS as this results in the power state of the VM changing from Powered On to Powered Off.