Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Increasing the time-out within vCenter for remote ESX hosts

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One of my colleagues is deploying an enormous VI3 environment. The customer wanted to have 1 central management console for all ESX hosts of which most hosts are located in a satellite offices. (One central management system for more than 200 hosts remote) With a 1Gb or more link this shouldn’t be a problem, but this customer had 64Kb links between these satellite offices and head quarters. This means that most ESX hosts were displayed as “disconnected” most of the time. To avoid this a time-out value for vCenter was increased:

The ESX Host sends heartbeats every 10 seconds, VirtualCenter server has window of 20 seconds to receive it. If the UDP Heartbeat message is not received VirtualCenter server will treat ESX as not responding.

By increasing the timeout limit in VirtualCenter, it will show the ESX host as continuously “connected”.

  1. Edit C:/Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data/VMware/VMware VirtualCenter/vpxd.cfg
  2. Add the following in the <vpxd> tags.
    <heartbeat>
    <notRespondingTimeout>60</notRespondingTimeout>
    </heartbeat>
  3. Restart VirtualCenter server service

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. pironet says

    Hi Duncan, while talking about network traffic between vCenter and ESX host how much bandwidth do you need? How much data is going thru both ends ?

    I guess you just need to multiply by the number of host you have in your environment, right ?

    Thx,
    PiroNet

  2. John says

    This is a GREAT tip. Making this change today. Thank you Duncan!

    I only wish the five tickets I opened with support had been able to provide this kind of simple information rather than having me run network traces and all manner of diagnostics.

  4. deercutter says

    If Ihave a 100MB connection to a remote site, should I set a timeout of 30 seconds then?

  5. Ashmai says

    Another reason you would want to increase this amount, is for ticketing. Lets say you are using an application like nWorks to agentlessly monitor your guests. Once in awhile you will see a small “hickup” or disconnect with your hosts, that will intern generate tickets for every VM that was on the host, regardless of how small of a window the disconnect was for. Increasing this # cuts back on the amount of tickets generated for non-critical issues like 5 second disconnects…

  6. Tim says

    Hi!

    What about vCenter 4? Can the timeout value be set there, too?

    thanks und greetings
    tim