Unresponsive Host

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• ESXi host becomes unresponsive
• The logs (/var/log/vmkernel.log and /var/log/hostd.log) will stop logging
• VMs will start to migrate from the affected host to the rest of the hosts in the cluster
• Trying to switch in DCUI will not work either

Environment

7.x

8.x

Resolution

Restart the ESXi host to fix the issue

OR

Instead of restarting the ESXi host to resolve the issue, consider sending a Non-Maskable Interrupt (NMI) via IPMI. This can help identify the root cause of the host's unresponsiveness. For more information on how to use NMI, please refer to this KB article Using hardware NMI facilities to troubleshoot unresponsive hosts