I just received an update from my assigned HP support engineer:
I got some info from VMware, the latest on the Problem Report is that engineering are currently testing a fix for the issue. Once complete there will be a patch available for the issue. At the moment VMware cannot give a time line of when the patch will be available. From looking at the SR attached to the bug the issue only impacts ESXi images. Both installable and embedded had encountered the issue.
I’m handling another case where the issue is reported with the vanilla version. So till the time the patch is released we need to use the workaround specified.
I can confirm that this bug is present on all versions of ESXi (vanilla, vendor customized images, installable and embedded versions) and on different storage platforms (local SAS RAID, SD-card). I don’t know exactly which versions of ESXi are affected, but I believe that version 4.1 and 4.1 Update 1 are affected.
Disabling both sfcbd-watchdog and sfcbd on the ESXi-host seems to be the only work-around available, and is confirmed to eliminate the problem of the disappearing symbolic links.
Please clarify how we know if we must be concerned about this.
What is the effect of this issue??
Thank you, Tom
The effect is that affected virtual machines won’t be manageable through the vSphere Client (connected to either vCenter Server or directly to the ESXi-host).
Happens to me on one specific ESXi 4.1 U1 host with HP image.
Workaround of disabling sfcbd service doesn’t help.
Do you have any update on the issue? Thanks.
Hi Michael,
The VM that is ‘missing’ (VM w/o a symlink) won’t magically come back after disabling sfcbd, but it should prevent other VM’s from diseappering. I think VMware is releasing a fix for this problem, but otherwise, I haven’t got an update for you.
What I mean is that after I disable sfcbd and reboot, if I restart management agents, VMs still get “unknown” status.