Inconsistent GuestOSNotRunning notifications from ESM Server Manager

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance
• Network Observability

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• In a specific customer environment, there were recurring examples of GuestOSNotRunning notifications coming from the Smarts Server Manager.  
• Checking the actual virtual machine in vSphere showed inconsistent results.  
• Sometimes an actual problem with VMTools would be found, but usually there would be no issue whatsoever despite the active notification.
  
  

Environment

All Supported Smarts releases

Cause

• There is a setting on the VMware Virtual Center Polling group called SuspendVMToolsPolling.  
  The default value for this setting is FALSE.
  
  
• The value set to TRUE makes vCenter polling faster. However, the VMTools status gets updated only during discovery.
  
  
• In this scenario, it was set to TRUE in order to improve the performance of the polling.  
  However, this causes very inconsistent results with the behavior of VMTools related notifications since the status of these problems is only updated during discovery.

Resolution

SuspendVMToolsPolling needs to be set to FALSE in order for these notifications to work properly.

Reference Documentation to perform the changes: Suspend VMTools Polling

If it must be left at TRUE to handle the performance load, one of the following should be considered:

1. Change the value of DisableVMToolsEvents to TRUE as the data is inconsistent anyway.
2. Split the environment into multiple ESM domains to better handle the load.
3. Increase the hardware CPU and memory to the ESM domain to allow more processing to take place.