Lately I’ve been fighting a remote cluster that has had its share of host and guest issues; this latest issue piqued my interest and its solution was so simple that I chuckled a bit.
Problem:
- The guest will not respond to power commands thru vCenter
- The guest OS has been shutdown thru Windows, but the VM shows a running state in vCenter
- Guest console is not working; cannot connect to MKS
Immediately, I jumped to the more exotic troubleshooting: checking for vmdk locks, grepping for guest processes that can be killed, etc. After not getting any luck in any of those areas, (and esxtop -> V not showing the VM guest as running), I decided to restart the management agents.
Problem solved. I’ll go ahead and file this under “You should really try looking at the simpler solutions before jumping to the more advanced ones”. 🙂