VMware vCentre/vSphere ‘Unknown VM’ and Inaccessible

Issue

Within the vSphere client or vCentre your virtual machine(s) are named as ‘Unknown VM’ and are inaccessible.

Solution

This can be caused by connectivity issues between the hypervisor and its datastore. To resolve the issue follow these steps,

  1. Log into the virtual machines host via SSH.
  2. Then change directory via the command  ‘cd /var/lib/vmware/hostd/stats‘.
  3. List the files in the directory via ‘ls‘. There should be 4.
  4. Remove the files using ‘rm *‘.
  5. Then restart the management agents via the command ‘/etc/init.d/hostd restart && /etc/init.d/vpxa restart‘.

Example

~ # cd /var/lib/vmware/hostd/stats
/var/lib/vmware/hostd/stats # ls
hostAgentStats-20.stats  hostAgentStats.idMap     hostAgentStats.xml
/var/lib/vmware/hostd/stats # rm *
/var/lib/vmware/hostd/stats # /etc/init.d/hostd restart
watchdog-hostd: Terminating watchdog process with PID 4982
hostd stopped.
hostd started.
/var/lib/vmware/hostd/stats # /etc/init.d/vpxa restart
watchdog-vpxa: Terminating watchdog process with PID 5279
vpxa stopped.
/var/lib/vmware/hostd/stats #

 

Rick Donato

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