I have had this issue for a long time, but it's finally getting annoying enough that I thought to check into it more thoroughly. I have set up an alarm with alerts for VM heartbeat and essentially I get so many alarms it's basically useless. The VM's always seem to be in a good state, sending heartbeats. I have no service interruptinos when I get the alerts. Further the alarms don't seem to clear.I can clear the heartbeat alarm on a VM by opening its console tab (I do not have to send input -- just opening the console to the blank DPMS standby screen is enough)
I have roughly 50 VM's spread over 8 hosts. The virtual machines are mostly Ubuntu 8.04 LTS with the up to date vmware tools packages, but I get the problems with other guests including Win2k3, Win2k8, XP, Debian, etc. I have mixed storage - some hosts are using FC, some iSCSI, some NFS -- all to different arrays. Alarm behavior does not seem to be dependent on storage either.
I'd like to be able to actually make use of the vm heartbeat alarm - it would be nice to know when a guest has really stopped sending heartbeats! There is no way that I can see to define the threshold at which these alarms are triggered either, and the fact that they don't clear continues to bug me. Any suggestions?