ESXi Health Perspectives

© 2019 VMware Inc. All rights reserved.

Learner Objectives
After completing this lesson, you should be able to meet the following objectives:
• Observe how ESXi Health Perspectives work
• Identify the uses of different health perspectives
• Disable health checks and health providers

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Overview of ESXi Health Perspectives
vSphere administrators must plan for changes to the ESXi host that occur as part of its basic life
cycle:
• Making the host available as capacity for new workloads
• Taking the host temporarily out of service for updates and upgrades
• Evacuating workloads to decommission the ESXi host
In vSphere 7.0, the new service called ESXi Health Perspectives (EHP) increases the reliability of
ESXi health status reports needed for these tasks.

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ESXi Host Life Cycle Management Enhancements
ESXi Health Perspectives automatically checks host health before update and upgrade tasks.
Each health perspective determines whether it is safe to transition an ESXi host to a target state.
Perspective Name Target State (ready to)
Initialization Receive workloads
Planned Maintenance Enter maintenance mode
Before Exit Maintenance Mode Exit maintenance mode
Decommission Be removed from a cluster
Ready for Apply Begin remediation

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Use Cases
With each health perspective, a predefined list of health checks is performed.
• Before a host is ready to receive workloads, EHP checks reports from several providers:
— vSphere High Availability reports on ESXi version compatibility in the cluster.
— vSAN reports on successfully applied disk configuration.
• Before entering maintenance mode, EHP looks for conditions that might prevent the transition:
— A host in the vSAN cluster is in maintenance mode, which might leave insufficient resources.
— A vCenter Server Appliance is running on the host and DRS is not in Fully Automated mode.
• Before a host in a vSAN cluster can exit maintenance mode, EHP checks the overall health
status of the cluster.

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Virtual Beans Scenario
As the vSphere administrator for Virtual Beans,
you must upgrade a cluster with vSAN, DRS,
and vSphere HA enabled.
ESXi Health Perspectives makes its calls to
obtain the health status of the cluster:
• vSphere HA reports that one host requires at
least one more HA heartbeat datastore.
• EHP reports a NOT_OK status.
• The upgrade is paused until the issue is
resolved.

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Integration with vCenter Server Services
ESXi Health Perspectives calls to other services to evaluate the state of the host.
These services are the health providers used by EHP:
• vpxd
• vSphere HA
• vSphere ESX Agent Manager (EAM)
An EHP agent does not exist on ESXi hosts.
EHP cannot run independent of vCenter Server.

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Integration with Update Coordinator
The only caller of ESXi Health Perspectives is
Update Coordinator.
Update Coordinator is a subcomponent of
Personality Manager that drives the life cycle
operations on the host, including upgrades and
reconfiguration of ESXi.
Update Coordinator handles the precheck and
remediate workflows on a cluster.
EHP and Personality Manager are hosted in the
Update Manager vAPI.

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Architecture of ESXi Health Perspectives
Update Coordinator calls EHP to ensure that the hosts are healthy before running a life cycle
operation.

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Requirements for EHP
ESXi Health Perspectives is installed on the vCenter Server Appliance.
It is hosted in the vAPI endpoint of the Update Manager.
No additional steps are required to configure it.

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Service Configuration
The ESXi Health Perspectives configuration
files are found in the /usr/lib/vmware-
updatemgr directory.
When changing the EHP configuration, the
vmware-updatemgr service must be
restarted.
Always back up files before changing them.

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Calling Health Perspectives
When the call to a health perspective finishes, a StatusInfo object is generated. The StatusInfo
object reports on the main attributes.
Attribute Description
Status Aggregated status based on all executed checks. Status options are OK,
NOT_OK, and WAIT.
Wait duration Only if the reported status is WAIT.
Amount of time to wait for before calling to the perspective again.
Check status List of checks with reported status of NOT_OK.

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Reporting Health Issues
The health issues reported by the health checks are displayed in the vSphere Client.
Reported issues provide clear messages to help in resolving the issues.

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Disabling Health Checks
A JSON configuration file in vCenter Server
contains the list of checks performed by each
health perspective.
Users can read and edit the configuration file to
disable the predefined checks.
The configuration file is found in
/usr/lib/vmware-
updatemgr/config/disabled_checks.js
on.
Restart the vmware-updatemgr service for
the changes to take effect.

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Disabling Health Providers
Users can disable health providers if the health reported is not relevant for the target operation.
The list of health providers is in /usr/lib/vmware-updatemgr/bin/vci-integrity.xml.
The configuration file has the following layout:
. . .
<EhpConfig>
<ExternalProviders>
<PROVIDER-ID>
<enabled>true/false</enabled>
</PROVIDER-ID>
</ExternalProviders>
</EhpConfig>
. . .
You can enable or disable a provider by changing the enabled value.
Restart the vmware-updatemgr service for the changes to take effect.

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Upgrading vCenter Server
The option of disabling checks is meant for certain situations:
• Potentially faulty checks
• Irrelevant checks preventing remediation actions
During an upgrade of vCenter Server, predefined checks revert to their defaults.
The list of manually disabled checks is not exported during upgrade.
Results of checks performed by EHP before and after vCenter Server upgrade might vary.

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Troubleshooting: Log Files
ESXi Health Perspectives logs are in /storage/log/vmware/vmware-updatemgr/vum-
server/vmware-vum-server.log.
To ensure that the Health Perspectives service is initialized correctly, check for the following
message: Successfully set up EHP.
If EHP fails, restart the vmware-updatemgr service.

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Troubleshooting: Keywords in Log Files
When looking for EHP-related messages in log files, use the keywords Esx Health
Perspectives.
2019-08-02T13:01:48.495Z info vmware-vum-server[17943] [Originator@6876
sub=Esx Health Perspectives] Getting disabled checks for
'BEFORE_EXIT_MAINTENANCE_MODE’...
2019-08-02T13:01:48.495Z info vmware-vum-server[17943] [Originator@6876
sub=Esx Health Perspectives] Filtering health checks...

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Reporting a Bug
To report a bug in Bugzilla, use the following information:
• Product = Personality Manager
• Category = vCenter
• Component = Health Status Perspectives
When filing a bug report, provide pertinent details about the environment, a clear description of
the problem, and steps for reproducing the error.

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Key Points
In vSphere 7.0, new health checks are managed by ESXi Health Perspectives (EHP).
EHP provides data to automatically determine whether a host is healthy to transition to a target
state, for example, enter maintenance mode or receive workloads.
If a health check blocks an upgrade process, take the following actions:
• View details of the reported issue to fix it.
• Disable the conflicting health check if not relevant.
Update Coordinator is the only caller of EHP. Manual calls cannot be made to EHP.

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Review of Learner Objectives
After completing this lesson, you should be able to meet the following objectives:
• Observe how ESXi Health Perspectives work
• Identify the uses of different health perspectives
• Disable health checks and health providers

© 2019 VMware, Inc. | -1

References
Title
EHP Functional Specification
EHP Architecture Specification
Update Coordinator Project
© 2019 VMware, Inc.
Location
https://confluence.eng.vmware.com/display/EHSP/E
HP+Functional+Specification
https://confluence.eng.vmware.com/display/EHSP/A
rchitecture+Specification
https://confluence.eng.vmware.com/display/Lifecycl
e/Update+Co-ordinator
| -1