ESXi 8.x, 7.x, 6.x Service sfcbd-watchdog Not Running / Fails to Start – VirtuallyThatGuy

Excited about ESXi 6.7 like everyone else so I updated the lab to version 6.7 vCenter, SRM, ESXi, vROPS, vSphere replication and boom PRTG (my primary monitoring tool) wasn’t picking up any hardware monitoring. I had problem with the VMware ESXi service sfcbd-watchdog which wouldn’t start on my newly deployed ESX 6.7 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.

This also works for esxi 8, 7 and 6.x

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

I googled a few times and came across the start command “/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog start”

This didn’t work as per above. I kept on digging and came across “esxcli system wbem set --enable true” then boom it started working.​​ 

Process to fix​​ sfcbd-watchdog

  • Enable SSH and Shell

  • Login to ESXi host as root

  • Run this command “esxcli system wbem set --enable true”

  • Log back to​​ Web client​​ and start the service​​ 

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12 Comments

    1. With me with 8.01 it does not work.
      I Had to enter “/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog start” in /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh

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