ESXi Host Shows “Not Responding” in vCenter and Fails to Power On via iDRAC

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

The ESXi host enters a “Not Responding” state in vCenter. Power-on attempts through iDRAC are unsuccessful - the host remains powered off, with the system status marked as “critical.” The focus is on restoring the virtual machines that were running on this host.

Error message displayed in the vCenter GUI for the host showing as "Not Responding":

 

Message displayed in iDRAC for the ESXi host:

Environment

7.0 U3s

Cause

The host remains in a powered-off state from iDRAC and doesn’t respond to any action. The system status is shown as "critical," indicating that the issue is related to a hardware failure.

Resolution

Steps to recover the VMs:

• Remove the problematic host from the vCenter GUI.
  
  
• This action automatically unregistered the VMs associated with that host.
  
  
• To add the VM back to the vCenter inventory, follow the steps mentioned in the article below. You can use either the vCenter GUI or CLI method.
  
  Add or Register a Virtual Machine (VM) in vCenter Server
  
  
• Once the VMs are re-registered, check their status to ensure they’re up and running properly.