vSAN Health Service - File Service - File Server Health

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

This article explains the File Service - File Server Health in the vSAN Health Service and provides details on why it might report an error.

Environment

VMware vSAN 8.0.x
VMware vSAN 7.0.x

Resolution

Q: What does File Service - File Server Health check do?

It checks if the file server is in a good state.
The column NFS Daemon checks if the NFS daemon process is running or not.
The column Network checks if the file server IP address is assigned or not.
The column Root File System Accessibility checks if the root file system is accessible to the file server.
The column SMB Connections shows the number of  active SMB client connections to the file server.
The column SMB Daemon checks if SMB daemon  process is running or not, and checks if the number of SMB client connections exceeds the limit.
The column DNS Lookup checks whether File server DNS configuration and connectivity is correct or not.
The column Active Directory checks whether File server AD join configuration and connectivity is correct or not.

Q: What does it mean when it is in an error state?

The column 'Description' will provide the detail error message which can be referred to the following table.
 

Check Item	Error Message Type
Network	File server IP address is not present
File Server	File server not found
NFS Daemon	NFS daemon is not running
Root File System Accessibility	Root file system is not responsive to the file server
SMB Daemon	SMB daemon is not running
	Current SMB connections ({count}) to the file server exceed the limit ({200}).
DNS Lookup	One or more DNS server is not reachable or File server IP and FQDN not matching with DNS entries.
Active Directory	File service is not configured with Active Directory. <Should be ignored>
	One or more domain controllers are not reachable from file server.

 

Note: There will be an error for 60 seconds when host enters maintenance mode or reboots.

Note: If the description shows 'File server not found', then items 'NFS Daemon', 'Network' and 'Root File System Accessibility' will all be marked red.

Q: How does one troubleshoot and fix the error state?

For file server health, the health status of its managing host and the corresponding file service VM needs to be confirmed. If there are enough healthy hosts with healthy file service VM, file server will be failed over automatically to another healthy host once it detects that the file server has some issues. The file server will not be marked GREEN until the failover process is completed.

For the error "SMB daemon is not running", Click Remediate File Service to start auto-remediation by force. In most cases, issues can be remediated automatically. 

For the error "SMB connections exceed the limit":
The performance of shares running on the file server with the warning message cannot be guaranteed. It is suggested to: 

• Close Idle SMB connections through MMC (Microsoft Management Console)
  • run "fsmgmt.msc /computer:\\<fileServerFQDN>" on Windows client to open MMC
  • click "Sessions" in the left pane, live SMB connections will be display in the right pane. close idle connections.

For DNS Lookup related error it is suggested to check following items:

1. Check if file service network can reach DNS servers.
2. Check if all of provided DNS servers are reachable. In case one or more DNS servers are changed, please update the File Service Domain configuration.
3. Check if both forward and reverse lookup entries are there for file server FQDN with DNS server. 
   Quick way to check is using nslookup utility and query FQDN and IP from DNS server.

For Active Directory related error it is suggested to check following items:

1. Check if AD is reachable from file service network.
2. Check if AD domain is responding well to other machines within the domain.
3. Check if the latency to authenticate with AD domain is too high.
4. Check if password provided at the time of configuration has been changed recently.
5. Check if there is any recent change in user permissions or related computer accounts for file servers, 
6. Check if some domain controller in Active Directory domain is down.