Forum Discussion

bushman4gc's avatar
bushman4gc
13 years ago

Why does one of my ESXi Servers show an uptime of -1 second?

SSIA. One of my ESXi Hosts is reporting an uptime of -1 second.

  • Steve_Francis's avatar
    Steve_Francis
    9 years ago

    Generally, this means your vcenter is overloaded, or under configured. "-1" is vcenter shorthand for "I can't answer this right now". It can also be returned when querying a VM, when the VM has been powered off. You'll get -1 for a few samples, then NaN (Not a number).

    Anyway to correct: as noted https://www.logicmonitor.com/support/monitoring/os-virtualization/esx-servers-vsphere/

    You must ensure your Vcenter server is sized appropriately for the numbers of hosts and VMs it is managing. See VMware's documentation for size requirements.  (Note that the Vcenter database requirements must be added to the Vcenter server requirements if they are on the same machine.)  If you are using Vcenter 5.5 or lower, it is also often necessary to tune the Vcenter memory configuration, as documented in VMware's knowledgebase here and here. (VCenter 6 will dynamically adjust the memory allocation to the services if the VM running Vcenter is allocated more memory and rebooted.) If Vcenter does not have enough resources, it may refuse some connections to the API (HTTPS) port (easily seen in the HTTPS- datasource in LogicMonitor), or it may report  a value of "-1" to some performance queries.  Both of these situations will cause gaps in graphs. 

     

     

  • Mike_Aracic's avatar
    Mike_Aracic
    Icon for Employee rankEmployee
    13 years ago

    LogicMonitor uses an ESX api to retrieve performance information from the ESX and vCenter servers. Weve noticed that, on some occasions, vCenter servers will return -1 for all counters from an attached vCenter host. Were still looking into the cause, but we have yet to see a case where an ESX host monitored directly did this. Because of this, and the ability to do hardware health monitoring, we suggest adding ESX hosts directly to monitoring. Send us an email with specifics or contact us using Engineer Chat, and wed be happy to look into your specific case.

  • Steve_Francis's avatar
    Steve_Francis
    Icon for Advisor rankAdvisor
    9 years ago

    Generally, this means your vcenter is overloaded, or under configured. "-1" is vcenter shorthand for "I can't answer this right now". It can also be returned when querying a VM, when the VM has been powered off. You'll get -1 for a few samples, then NaN (Not a number).

    Anyway to correct: as noted https://www.logicmonitor.com/support/monitoring/os-virtualization/esx-servers-vsphere/

    You must ensure your Vcenter server is sized appropriately for the numbers of hosts and VMs it is managing. See VMware's documentation for size requirements.  (Note that the Vcenter database requirements must be added to the Vcenter server requirements if they are on the same machine.)  If you are using Vcenter 5.5 or lower, it is also often necessary to tune the Vcenter memory configuration, as documented in VMware's knowledgebase here and here. (VCenter 6 will dynamically adjust the memory allocation to the services if the VM running Vcenter is allocated more memory and rebooted.) If Vcenter does not have enough resources, it may refuse some connections to the API (HTTPS) port (easily seen in the HTTPS- datasource in LogicMonitor), or it may report  a value of "-1" to some performance queries.  Both of these situations will cause gaps in graphs.