A lot of VM in Gray in the VMState View

[Christopher Keyaert]

Dear All,

I'm currently using Nworks 5.5 with 3 collectors servers and 67 ESX.
When I take a look in the VMState view, I see a lot of VMs in gray, but I really don't understand why, because these vm are up and running.



In the computers view, the server is up and running



All the servers in gray are not on the same ESX, are not monitored by the same collector.
Do you have an idea, from where I could start to debug ?
Also, on my 3 collectors, in the OperationsManager eventlogs, I've a lot of these events :

Event Type: Information
Event Source: OpsMgr Connector
Event Category: None
Event ID: 21042
Date: 9/15/2010
Time: 3:01:44 PM
User: N/A
Computer: BRAMOMVSP001
Description:
Operations Manager has discarded 294 items in management group xxxOM2007, which came from cenmomms001.xxxxxx.com. These items have been discarded because no valid route exists at this time. This can happen when new devices are added to the topology but the complete topology has not been distributed yet. The discarded items will be regenerated.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

[Christopher Keyaert]

Another example :

[Alec King]

Hi Christopher,

I have seen this situation before, it seems related to some problem with the System Center Management Configuration Service (on your RMS).
Could you try restart of the Configuration Service? This usually resolves the issue.

Cheers,
Alec

[Christopher Keyaert]

For now, I cannot, we are in validated and high critical environment, so I will plan that for the maintenance weekend and keep you posted.

Thank you

[Alec King]

Thanks Christopher - understood. Please let us know when you can if the service restart fixes the problem.

Regards,
Alec

[Christopher Keyaert]

Hi Alec,

So I restarted the service, that fixed the issue for almost all servers, only three was still in Gray, but now, after two hours, I've got again some servers in gray, not so many than the first time, but I've still good some.
How could I debug that ? I find that really critic.

Regards
Christopher

[Alec King]

Hi Christopher,

OK - so, restart of Config service does fix it, but the problem re-occurs....

BTW - the VMs that are in this 'gray' state actually ARE still monitored - alerts will stil fire, performance data is still collected etc.
It seems to be a factor that only affects the SCOM UI, not the monitoring functionality.
But anyway I fully understand why you don't want VMs to be greyed-out in the console!

Do you have a lot of vMotion in your environment? Is DRS turned on, if so how aggressive are the settings?
I think this problem is related to VMs moving from host to host (and the problem with the SCOM Config service updating and tracking those moves)

We might be best to ask you to raise a support call, so we can capture logs etc. Could you send an email request to our Support team please? (support at veeam dot com)

Cheers,
Alec

[Christopher Keyaert]

Hello Alec,

Thank you for your fast and complete answer. I will follow your advise and raise a Case to your support on Monday morning.