Constant root Logins to IBM ESXi Hosts

So recently I found there was a fun issue happening on my ESXi Hosts

This was happening a couple times a minute, essentially filling up the events tab for each host. Which although it didn’t seem to be affecting performance, it was incredibly annoying and “noisy”.

After calling digging in and not really being able to find anything in any of the usual logs, I decided to give in and call support 🙂

Quick Aside: I never have a problem calling support, but I always judge myself for calling support. Sometimes I judge myself nicely if support takes hours or days to figure out what is going on; sometimes I judge myself poorly if support solves it in minutes. Fortunately for my own self-esteem/worth, support took a while to figure this one out.

Eventually we(by we I mean support) found the culprit.

As you can see at the bottom, there are two tasks running every and every other minute on each of the hosts. Also from the pic we see that IBM is more or less the culprit.

This makes sense because I used a custom IBM ESXi image to install/configure the hosts. However this had not been happening since day one.

Anyway…

Now that I knew what was going on it didn’t take me long to find my next steps. There was seemingly an update for the IBM parts of ESXi I had installed. It always takes me a while to navigate how to get to where I need on the IBM site; fortunately there were some instructions that told me exactly where I needed to go.

From there I quickly found the files

And although IBM has some pretty in-dept instruction for how to install the updates, I simply uploaded the zip to Update Manage and patched that way…MUCH EASIER

Now I am no longer plagued by these annoying event messages

ALSO

@Josh_Atwell and I are signed up to do a VMWORLD SESSION

You should go vote for it!!! If you know anything about the two of us, you know there will definitely be some on-stage heckling. Audience Heckling will also be encouraged I am sure!

So Vote for it! Session 4887!