Troubleshooting ESXi hosts in your VMware Cloud

Occasionally issues may occur with your VMware Cloud environment that cause problems with your hosts or VMs. When this happens, MacStadium will troubleshoot the environment to determine where the root cause may be and try to provide resolutions to the best of our ability and within the scope of support we provide.

One step that can assist MacStadium in troubleshooting your VMware Cloud is to put a problem host into Maintenance Mode. This allows MacStadium to more readily access the host and perform any intrusive diagnostics that may be needed to resolve the problem.

Note that MacStadium does not make any changes in your environment without your permission; however, putting your host into Maintenance Mode ensures that the host is not in production use and allows our support to begin deep troubleshooting more quickly.

Putting a host into Maintenance Mode will move all running VMs on the host to another host available in the cluster. While the host is in Maintenance Mode, the resources available on the host will not be available. This could lead to performance issues within your environment until the host is removed from Maintenance Mode. This option is only available if the host is still responsive to the vCenter. If the host is in the Disconnected or Not Responding state, you will not be able to perform these steps.

The steps to do this are simple.

Login to your VMware Cloud environment and find the host in question.
Right-click the host and select Enter Maintenance Mode.
If there are any running VMs on the host at the time, they should vMotion over to another host. If you find the VMs do not move, there may be some additional configurations in your environment preventing this step. If your host does not enter Maintenance Mode within 10 minutes of starting the process, you may cancel the task in the Task List in the bottom of the Web Client and notify MacStadium Support.
Once the host is in Maintenance Mode (you will see a caution tape icon over the host), notify MacStadium Support that it is ready to be reviewed.
Once the host is ready to go back into rotation, MacStadium Support will notify you. You may then right-click the host and select Exit Maintenance Mode.