Admin Mistake: VMware ESX DRS Error
Background
After a hardware maintenace performed by a company some virtual machines could not be backed up by the VMware Solution of Symantec NetBackup.
Problem
All the affected virtual machines were hosted on the same VMware ESX server and if you log in to the VMware vSphere you were receiving the below error.
Unable to apply DRS resource settings on host 'hostname.somewhere' in SomeDatacenter'(Reason:A general system error occured: Invalid fault). This can significantly reduce the effectiveness of DRS.
Mistake
After the hardware maintenance the engineers did not check that all the VMware services were running properly. In this case Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) had some issues on this specific server.
Resolution
This is very simple. A restart of the hostd daemon will almost certainly fix the problem. In this case after restarting the management services everything went back to normal operation.
[root@somewhere ~]# service mgmt-vmware restart Stopping VMware ESX Server Management services: VMware ESX Server Host Agent Watchdog [ OK ] VMware ESX Server Host Agent [ OK ] Starting VMware ESX Server Management services: VMware ESX Server Host Agent (background) [ OK ] Availability report startup (background) [ OK ] [root@somewhere ~]#
