Virtual Machine Heartbeat State – Band Aid

From time to time, I get one of these:

Target: VirtualMachine1
Old Status: Green
New Status: Red

Current value:
Virtual Machine Heartbeat State – (State = Red)

Alarm: Virtual Machine Heartbeat State
([Yellow State Is Equal To yellow; Red State Is Equal To red])

Description:
Alarm Virtual Machine Heartbeat State on VirtualMachine1 changed from Green to Red
Just one of those alarms from vCenter that tells me that a VM’s Heartbeat isn’t being heard.

It is kind of a pain to look into these after hours, and when you aren’t paying attention to the alerts… So I figured I’d put a band-aid on the problem, until I get a chance to look deeper into the problem.

So I wrote a .VBS that will stop and restart the VMTOOLS service through a WMI call, and saved it to C:SCRIPTS on the vCenter Server.

Here’s the .VBS (restarttools.vbs):

‘Get the Guest Name from {targetName}
TargetServer = Wscript.Arguments(0)

‘The Domain User used to connect to the target guest via WMI
Username = “DOMAINUsername”

‘Get the Password from the 2nd Script Argument
Password = Wscript.Arguments(1)

Set objSWbemLocator = CreateObject(“WBemScripting.SWbemLocator”)

‘Connect using the Username and Password
Set objWMIService = objSWbemLocator.ConnectServer & _
(TargetServer, “rootcimv2”, Username, Password)

‘Grab all of the services named vmtools
Set colServices = objWMIService.ExecQuery (“Select * ” & _
from Win32_Service Where Name = ‘vmtools'”)

‘Stop the vmtools service
For Each objService in colServices
errReturnCode = objService.StopService()
Next

Wscript.Sleep 20000

‘Start the vmtools service
For Each objService in colServices
errReturnCode = objService.StartService()
Next

I then created an alarm that runs the .VBS when the Heartbeat State changes:

Make sure the “Run A Script” option has the following syntax:

cscript /nologo c:scriptsrestarttools.vbs {targetName} Password

I also have an e-mail alert to notify me when this happens. Typically, when this occurs, I’ll get a a Green to Red or Yellow, followed by a Red or Yellow to Green about a minute later.

It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, the little script does the trick.