ESX/ESXi hosts that take too long to power on are marked as failing to exit standby mode by vCenter Server

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

An ESX/ESXi host might be placed in standby mode by the VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM) feature to reduce power consumption. Also, a user can manually place the host in standby mode. The host that enters standby mode is powered off.

When DPM or a user later attempt to take the host out of standby mode, if the exit standby operation takes more than 15 minutes, vCenter Server might mark the host as having failed to exit standby mode. Though the host powers on successfully after the time limit and reconnects with vCenter Server at that time, vCenter Server continues to consider the exit standby operation as having failed.

Environment

VMware ESXi 4.0.x Embedded
VMware ESX 4.0.x
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Installable
VMware ESX 4.1.x

Resolution

DPM should be disabled on a host that takes a long time to power on, and the user should avoid putting such a host into standby. One example of a host that might take a long time to exit standby mode is a host that has a large number (more than 250) of datastores.