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