VMWare ESXi 6.5 has no data after probe

[Cubert]

VMware has sent out 6.5 with the watchdog service disable and not really working well from the web UI.

After playing with a fresh install of ESXi 6.5 we found that the CIM services were off and when we turned them on it shows it was running but on further evaluation we found the service had failed and CIM watchdog service was not running.

Going to the SSH console and running a

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/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog start

Produced an error that the watchdog services were administratively disabled.

After doing some research we found that in 6.5 you should enable the service like so

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 esxcli system wbem set --enable true

Afterwards run the following to restart the services

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 /etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog start

Next, to verify that the CIM service are running correctly run

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lsof -nPV | awk {'count[$2]++}END{for(i in count)print count[i], i'} | sort -n

Look at the output and see if in the list returned you see the following 2 services

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sfcb-HTTP-Daemo
sfcb-HTTPS-Daem

If they are there then you should be good to go. You can telnet the esxi host on port 5989 and if you do not get a connection rejected message then the ports are open and ready to take cim requests.

Do not just try and start the service, it will say it's running but will have failed to start.

ESX6.5-Web-after-reboot.PNG (131.98 KiB) Viewed 8089 times

To see if CIM is running or not just go to the hardware tab in the ESX Web UI. No Data means no CIM services available.

ESX6.5-Web-no-data.PNG (88.4 KiB) Viewed 8089 times

A good output when running watchdog start command

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 /etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog start
sfcbd-init: Getting Exclusive access, please wait...
sfcbd-init: Exclusive access granted.
sfcbd-init: Request to start sfcbd-watchdog, pid 69438
sfcbd-config[69448]: No third party cim providers installed
sfcbd-init: snmp has not been enabled.
sfcbd-init: starting sfcbd
sfcbd-init: Waiting for sfcb to start up.
sfcbd-init: Program started normally.

[Cubert]

See how we found this issue at http://www.squidworks.net/2017/02/vmwar ... y-default/

Knowledge is power!