A few days back i had problem with the VMware ESXi service sfcbd-watchdog which wouldn’t start on my newly deployed ESX 6.5a (build number 4887370) servers and since the service is used for hardware monitoring purposes it is quite important. The service is disabled and is in stopped state from ESXi 6.5 so this blog post will be about my findings and how you can get the service to a running state.

There is an option to control all services via the ESXi host client which you can access via https://ESXi-host-FQDN. After logging on to the ESXi host client as user root you go to Host -> Manage -> Services

As you can see in the below figure the service is in Stopped state.

After I tried to start the service by clicking Start button you can see in the below figure that the UI shows the service as Running but I still couldn’t connect to the service.

I checked the service status from command line by running the following command:

/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog status

Gave me the following output

sfcbd is not running

Since status was not running I tried to start the service by running the following command:

Trying to start the sfcbd-watchdog service manually via the command:

/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog start



The start command gave me the following output:

sfcbd-init: Getting Exclusive access, please wait…

sfcbd-init: Exclusive access granted.

sfcbd-init: Request to start sfcbd-watchdog, pid 68162

sfcbd-config[68172]: No third party cim providers installed

sfcbd-init: sfcbd not started, administratively disabled.

The output made me check the system wbem status running the following command:

esxcli system wbem get

The output I got was:

Authorization Model: password

Enabled: false

Loglevel: warning

Port: 5989

WSManagement Service: true

Since it returned “Enabled=false” I enabled it by running the following command:

esxcli system wbem set –enable true (two minus signs before enable)

One again checking the wbem status by running the wbem status command:

esxcli system wbem get

Game me the following output:

Authorization Model: password

Enabled: true

Loglevel: warning

Port: 5989

WSManagement Service: true

After that I checked the service status by running the sfcbd-watchdog status command:

/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog status

Gave me the following output:

sfcbd is running

All good and service is up and running….