Restarting the Management agents in VMware ESXi

Step by step guide to resolve "VMware ESXi to resolve Virtual machine creation may fail because agent is unable to retrieve VM creation options from the host" when an administrator is unable to connect directly to the ESXi host or manage under vCenter server.

Hello everyone and welcome to this new Dell video today.

We are going to see how we can restart the management agents. We can do this operation in two ways. The first way is through the direct console and the second way is through SSH we are going to start by restarting the management agents in ESXi using the direct console. So first we log in our vsphere and we can go and find the Idrac IP address in uh the host we wish to restart the management agents for.

So we go to monitor and then we go to physical view and we will find the Idrac IP address as well as the ESXi IP address. We can click on the ID IP address and we go down and then here we find the virtual console. We are going to use direct console. We click on F2 to customize the system. You can use your keyboard or you can use the console keyboard. So we click on F2 and we log in using our roots login name and then the roots password and enter to validate the credentials. Ok.

Now we have the system customization. We go down you can use the arrows to move up and down the options. And we navigate until we find troubleshooting options in troubleshooting options. We go down until we find restart. Management agents. We click on it. Once we have pressed enter we have to press F11 to validate or escape to cancel. Now we've press F11 to validate the restart. And now you can see that the management agents have stopped and they will restart in a moment.

You can keep this console open to watch as the management agents restart or you can click on escape. This operation can take a few minutes but usually it would show in few seconds. Now we see that the management agents started and this is how we can restart the management agents through the direct console. Now we will do the second uh way to do this which is to restart the management agents through the ESXi SSH or secure shell. So the second way of restarting management agents in ESXi is by connecting to CLI through SSH. For this you will have to check first.

If SSH is enabled you can just go to the configure tab go all the way down until you find services and make sure that SSH is running. Now we open an SSH session to the ESXi hosts using the IP address and we log in as roots after that we restart the ESXi host demon and we center agent services using the following commands. The first command is as we can see it stopped the services and it started them back and now we can run the second command. Now we have restarted the management agents in the ESXi host.

Sometimes we might need to restart all management agents on the host for that. We can run the following command. But you might want to check if LAP is enabled and configured on this host before running this command because you can't run if it is. And those are the two ways of restarting the management agents on the hosts.

Thank you for watching this video.