Testing the Monitoring virtual machines functionality in vCenter Server

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Monitoring virtual machines is a supported function in VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 and later.

 

This article provides the procedure used to test the functionality of the Monitoring Virtual Machines process in VirtualCenter.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x
VMware VirtualCenter 2.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.x - View
VMware vCenter Server 5.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 4.1.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.0 Beta
VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Extended Support
VMware vCenter Server 4.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.0.x

Resolution

The Monitoring Virtual Machines component is a function of the VMware High Availability (HA) tool in VMware VirtualCenter. Ensure that you have reviewed this information prior to proceeding with this test.

Environment Configuration

To configure your environment to use Monitoring virtual machines:

1. Configure VMware HA on the cluster. 
   
   Notes:
    
   • vCenter Server 4.0 introduces an additional disk I/O status check, after virtual machine heartbeat fails to prevent accidental reboots.
   • This ensures a wait of 120 seconds, of no disk I/O operation, before a restart.
   • As a result, your virtual machine may not restart after completing the preceding steps.
     
     To resolve this issue, disable the disk I/O check.
     
     To disable the disk I/O check:
     
     Set the das.iostatsInterval advanced vSphere HA attribute to 0.
      
2. Enable Monitoring Virtual Machines feature, and define a sensitivity setting. 
3. Install VMware Tools on the virtual machine being used for testing. 
4. Verify VM Restart Priority for the virtual machine does not have Disabled checkbox selected. 

Test Procedure

This test simulates a loss of heartbeat signal from the virtual machine to replicate a monitoring failure. To create this loss of signal, you need to terminate the VMware Tools processes within the guest. When the heartbeat signal is lost, VMware HA monitors the signal for a predefined failure interval. After this failure interval has elapsed, VMware HA attempts to restart the virtual machine. For ESX hosts with hostd logging set to verbose, information is logged to the /var/log/vmware/hostd log files.

 

To disable the heartbeat, follow the procedure for the type of guest operating system installed on the virtual machine:

 

Windows Guest

You can stop the VMware Tools Heartbeat signal by stopping the VMware Tools service and VMwareUser.exe process within Windows.

Note: In vCenter Server5.0, the VMwareUser.exe process is replaced by vmtoolsd.exe.

 

In vCenter server 6.0, tools need to stop by following these steps:

1. Check PID of vmtoolsd.exe by running this command:
   
   "tasklist | findstr vmtoolsd"
    
2. Kill all process of vmtoolsd.exe by running this command:
   
   taskkill /PID/F

 

Linux Guest

Run this command to disable VMware Tools:

/etc/init.d/vmware-tools stop

 

Note: To test rest VM in 6.0

1. Check PID of vmtoolsd by running this command:
   
   #ps -alx |grep vmtoolsd
    
2. Kill process of vmtoolsd by running this command:
   
   #kill -9 PID

In addition, For RHEL 7.0 or later, If kill -9 command does not work, Please stop by running this command:

systemctl stop vmtoolsd.service