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. 

     

     

Steve_Francis's avatar
Steve_Francis
Former Employee
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.