ESXi hosts in All Paths Down (APD) condition may appear as Not Responding in vCenter Server
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ESXi hosts in All Paths Down (APD) condition may appear as Not Responding in vCenter Server

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Article ID: 318938

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Updated On:

Products

VMware vCenter Server VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
An ESXi host with one or more LUNs in an All Paths Down (APD) condition may become not manageable in vCenter server and may experience these symptoms:

  • The ESXi host appears as Disconnected or Not Responding in the vCenter Server inventory
  • Virtual machines using the LUNs experiencing the APD may become unresponsive

Cause

If datastores that are needed by an ESXi host are no longer accessible because all data paths between the ESXi host and the datastore are no longer passing packets, then the ESXi host may appear as "Not Responding" when viewed from vCenter server. 

To validate if this is the case, determine whether there are any LUNs (datastores) in an All Paths Down (APD) state on an ESXi host:

1) Open a SSH session to the ESXi host

2) Change directory to the /var/run/log/ directory

3) Look for events that contain the string "esx.problem.storage.apd.start" and "esx.clear.storage.apd.exit" in the vobd.log file in that directory.

EXAMPLES:

2025-09-26T17:07:02.255Z: [APDCorrelator] 15992267920301us: [esx.problem.storage.apd.start] Device or filesystem with identifier [########-########] has entered the All Paths Down state.
2025-09-26T17:07:08.764Z: [APDCorrelator] 15992274428660us: [esx.clear.storage.apd.exit] Device or filesystem with identifier [########-########] has exited the All Paths Down state.

Where:  ########-######## represents the identifier of the datastore.  In this example, the identifier is for an NFS datastore, and the details of the datastore can be found in the output of the "esxcfg-info | less" command by searching for that identifier.

Resolution

If whatever condition that is inhibiting the passing of packets along the data paths between the ESXi host and the datastore can be cured, then the ESXi host may return to a normal status when viewed from vCenter, as the host exits from the All Paths Down state.

If the datastore in question is an NFS datastore (as in the above example), then connectivity can be confirmed by following the steps in Troubleshooting NFS datastore connectivity issues

If that is not possible, then the ESXi host can be rebooted, and after the reboot is complete, it should appear as normal in vCenter (although if the condition is not cured for the datastore in question, it will still not be accessible from the host).  

 

 

Additional Information

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