VMware vSphere 5.1 Update 1 Fix: No values for CPU and Memory in the ESXi 5.x host

2 min read

Kees Baggerman·Senior Technical Director at Nutanix – Former Citrix CTP – NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor – 15+ years in EUC

All posts →

After an upgrade of VMware 4.1 to VMware vSphere 5.1 Update 1 one of my colleagues Wilbert Kandt noticed that the environment wasn’t properly load balanced. The problem was that an ESXi host wasn’t used as destination within a VMware DRS cluster after a while.

After some investigation it became clear that the CPU and memory usage of the ESXi host wasn’t shown in vCenter.

When the vCenter Client was used to make a direct connection to the host the CPU and memory usage was displayed correctly. So it was save to say the problem was the latest upgrade of vCenter and it had something to do with the communication between the management agent en vCenter.

Because of this issue the load isn’t indexed correctly thus DRS isn’t able to do its job because there’s no reported load which can cause performance issues and disruptions for the end user.

This behavior was caused by a bug in vCenter Server and this bug is in the following versions of vCenter:

• 5.1 (799731),
• 5.1.0a (880471),
• 5.1.0b (947939)

The solution was pretty easy, vCenter had to be upgraded to the lastest version: vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1. (5.1.U1-1065152)

If you’re not able to upgrade vCenter there’s a temporary workaround by restarting the VMware Management agents which restores the connection between the ESXi host and vCenter. There’s an KB article describing how you can restart the agents: 1003490 and it includes a small video demonstrating how you can do this too. Please keep VMware HA and Autostartup list in mind when restarting the agents.

I can’t stress the fact that if you’re going to do an upgrade (of any product that is) you should always read the release notes and the known issues so you can decide impact and always ALWAYS have a rollback scenario.

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

Latest posts by Kees Baggerman (see all)

• Your Cloud Desktop Is Running on Yesterday’s Silicon - May 21, 2026
• When the Orchard Ships Production Software: AI-Augmented Development in the Real World - May 17, 2026
• Nutanix Documentation Script v5.0: Visual Reports, Brand Templates, and Seven Embedded Diagrams - May 15, 2026
• Nutanix AHV and Citrix MCS: Adding a persistent disk via Powershell – v2 - November 19, 2019
• Recovering a Protection Domain snapshot to a VM - September 13, 2019

Kees Baggerman

Senior Technical Director at Nutanix - Former Citrix CTP - NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor - 15+ years in EUC

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

X / Twitter LinkedIn GitHub Email