Once again I’m reminded that going in and doing /etc/init.d/mgmt-vmware restart and then /etc/init.d/vmware-vpxa restart is fairly dangerous and should only be done as a LAST resort.

A co-worker was removing old NFS mounts and replacing them with new ones.   So same named NFS mount was being used.   He did an esxcfg-nas -d and then an esxcfg-nas -a and per our instructions, restart the mgmt agents so VirtualCenter would see them properly.   In doing this with U4 plus a month of patches, VirtualCenter lost connectivity with the host agent with a vim.fault.NotAuthenticated.

The fix is to disconnect and reconnect as you can’t put these systems into Maintenance Mode since VMotion doesn’t work.    Together we figured out a nicer way to do the mount point cleanup.

• esxcfg-nas -d <mountpoint>
• esxcfg-nas -a <mountpoint> …
• vimsh -n -e “internalsvc/refresh_datastores”
• vimsh -n -e “hostsvc/datastore/refresh <mountpoint>”