VMware vSphere 4.1: host performance graphs show “No data available”, except the realtime view, which works fine

Question

Here's our scenario:

Site 1 has 3 hosts, and our vCenter server is here.

Site 2 has 3 hosts.

All hosts are ESXi 4.1 update 1.

If I view the Performance tab for any host in Site 1, I can view realtime, 1 Day, etc., i.e. all the views give me graph data.

For the hosts in Site 2, I can view the realtime graphs, 1 Day and 1 Week both say "No data available". 1 Month had mostly nothing, 1 Year shows that it was working fine for a long time and then started breaking.

1 Month view:

1 Year view:

What would cause this loss of performance data?

Answer 1

I see this very often, basically it's lack of data collection; could be anything, could be the VC was down/busy, the host/s were down/busy, link loss etc. Essentially data collection is a very low priority thing from a VMWare perspective and it handles lost data well so I see the same thing all the time. Sorry this doesn't actually fix anything.

Answer 2

If the issue is intermittent, it can normally be resolved by the restarting the vCenter Server. However, there are a number of other issues that could be related specifically if there are issues on the SQL, in vCenter, or if an upgrade of vCenter was recently done. These points are well documented in the VMware Support Knowledge Base and release notes.