vSphere Alarm: vSphere HA Virtual Machine Monitoring Action

Case: vSphere HA virtual machine monitoring action alarm

vSphere High Availability is a utility that pools the ESXi hosts and virtual machines into a cluster for monitoring and automatically restart failed virtual machines on alternative host to reduce application downtime and ensure business continuity.

When you enabled vSphere HA on a cluster, you may find yourself triggered some alarm. For example: vSphere HA virtual machine monitoring action.

What does this vSphere HA virtual machine monitoring action alarm mean, what is causing this alarm, and how to fix it? Next, this article will provide you with the answer.

What causes vSphere HA virtual machine monitoring action

vSphere HA monitors virtual machines and applications with heartbeat mechanism, which is an artificially generated signal produced by VMware Tools.

If vSphere HA VM Monitoring does not receive a heartbeat from VMware Tools for a specified time, and there is no disk I/O activity on the VM, the vSphere HA VM Monitoring will recognize the VM as nonresponsive and restart the VM on the cluster. And you can see the alarm is triggered.

Thus, with this mechanism, vSphere HA can detect the following types of host issues

• Failure: A host stops functioning.
• Isolation: A host cannot communicate with any other hosts in the cluster.
• Partition: A host loses network connectivity with the primary host.

According to VMware Knowledge Base, the trigger conditions of the vSphere HA virtual machine monitoring action alarm contain:

• vSphere HA enabled VM reset with screenshot.
• vSphere HA is resetting VM.

For more details, you can check the screenshot in the VM’s folder taken by ESXi host before resetting the VM.

How to fix vSphere HA virtual machine monitoring action

Receiving vSphere HA virtual machine monitoring action alarm may cause your vSphere HA cannot reset VM, and the error message may display “vSphere HA virtual machine monitoring error”, but actually it is not a big deal. You can still clear the alarm, and manually power off and restart the VM.

If the vSphere HA virtual machine monitoring action alarm reappear, you can try reinstalling VMware Tools and re-enabling vSphere HA VM Monitoring feature.

From vCenter, you can clear the alarm from the virtual machine via the following steps:

1. Navigate to Monitor tab, and click Issues and Alarms > Triggered Alarms.

2. Select the alarm and select Acknowledge.

3. Open the vCenter Object and navigate to Monitor > Issues and Alarms > Triggered Alarms. From this object, select the active alarm and click RESET TO GREEN.

A dedicated vSphere backup software – AOMEI Cyber Backup

You may need an effective backup software for VMware vSphere to protect your virtual environment and gain the ability to quickly recover your virtual machines when needed. In this article, I will introduce an efficient vSphere backup software - AOMEI Cyber Backup, which enables you to backup multiple VMs either managed by vCenter Server, or on a standalone ESXi host.

It simplifies the backup process and present the steps with intuitive GUI interface. In addition, it offers you the following benefits.

✦ Agentless Backup: create complete and independent image-level backup for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V VMs.
✦ Flexible vSphere Backup: batch backup large numbers of VMs managed by vCenter Server, or multiple VMs on a standalone ESXi host.
✦ Multiple Storage Destinations: backup to local drive, or network destinations like Windows share or NAS.
✦ Automated Execution: create backup schedules to automate backups daily, weekly, monthly.
✦ Role Assignment: allows one administrator to create sub-accounts with limited privileges.

AOMEI Cyber Backup supports both paid and free versions of VMware ESXi 6.0 and later versions. Next, I will show you how to perform vSphere VM backup and restore via AOMEI Cyber Backup. You can click the following button to download the free trial.

*You can choose to install this VM backup software on either Windows or Linux system.

Steps to perform vSphere backup and restore via AOMEI Cyber Backup

▶ Backup multiple VMs:

1. Bind Devices: Access to AOMEI Cyber Backup web client, navigate to Source Device > VMware > + Add VMware Device to Add vCenter or Standalone ESXi host. And then click … > Bind Device.

2. Create Backup Task: Navigate to Backup Task > + Create New Task, and select VMware ESXi Backup as the Backup Type.

3. Set the Task Name, Device, Target, Schedule and Cleanup as needed.

• Task Name: you can change the task name or use the default name with an ordinal.
• Device: batch backup multiple VMs on vCenter or standalone host within one backup task.

• Target: select to back up to a local path, or to a network path like NAS.
• Schedule (optional): perform full, differential, or incremental backup, and automate execution according to the frequency you specified.

• Cleanup (optional): automatically delete the old backup copies that exceed the retention period you specified.

4. Run Backup: Now you can click Start Backup and select Add the schedule and start backup now, or Add the schedule only.

Created backup tasks will be listed and monitored separately for restoring, progress checking and schedule changing.

▶ Restore VM from backup:

5. Restore from Backup: Select the backup task you want to restore, and click ... > Restore to open the wizard.

Or you can click Backup Management > History Versions. Specify a VM and select a restore point from the left list.

6. Start Restore: Choose to Restore to original location or Restore to new location. And click Start Restore to recover the virtual machine in place.

▶ Restore to new location: Create a new VM in the same or another datastore/host directly from the backup to perform out-of-spacre recovery, saves the trouble of re-configuring the new VM.

Summary

vSphere HA VM Monitoring is a feature that monitors the VMs and auto restart the VM on alternative hosts to maintain business continuity. This article briefly introduces the vSphere alarm “vSphere HA virtual machine monitoring action” and summarizes several measures that can be tried when it is received.

vSphere High Availability is an advanced feature that may significantly increase your VM data protection cost. If you are looking for an affordable VM protection measure, you can try backup VMware ESXi VMs via the affordable agentless software AOMEI Cyber Backup.