VM lost its ping response and went into inaccessible state ESXi 7.0.3

By | November 29, 2022

I’ve noticed this issue on one of the ESXi host “VM lost its ping response and went into inaccessible state ESXi 7.0.3“.

On the VM side, under “Power” options, only “Hard stop” is enabled and the rest of the options are greyed out. Virtual server lost its ping response. However, ESXi host has ping response.

Have noticed that, backup snapshot there on the VM which had issues. Tried to delete the snapshot, but, it throwed a message that “Another task is in progress”.

Tried the below steps to fix the issue:

SSH to the ESXi host (connect to the ESXi host where the problematic VM residing on)

# vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms (this command gives the information about all VMs on the ESXi host)

The above command prints the information of each VM and its task id.

Pick the task id from the above list and run the below command –

# vim-cmd vimsvc/task_list

In the above screenshot, it is showing the backup snapshot task still running on the problematic VM.

Have tried to kill the above process, but no luck.

Please note that, ESXi host has ping response. I tried the another troubleshooting step to fix the issue –

/etc/init.d/hostd restart
/etc/init.d/vpxa restart

The above commands will help to restart the ESXi host management services.

Before running the above commands, the ESXi host was in “connected” state. After I ran those commands, it went to “not responding” state and didn’t come back.

I looked at the vmkernel log, hostd log and vmware log to figure out the root of the issue. Noticed there are different errors related to storage and fibre channel adapter. Also found path degraded errors too.

Found few log errors like below:

Admission failure in path: host/vim/vmvisor/plugins/smx:sfcb-ProviderMa.13019768:uw.13019768
UserWorld ‘sfcb-smx’ with cmdline ‘/bin/sfcbd’
ALERT: hostd detected to be non-responsive

Conclusion: I had to reboot the ESXi host to fix the issue.

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