ESX Host and SSH Commands Unresponsive

Just had this issue with a college, one of our ESX hosts was unresponsive, ie if you typed in a command to list Virtual Machines; vmware-cmd -l nothing would show up, like it was hung.

Here is what you need to do…

ps -ef | grep vmware-hostd

You should see something like:

root 3545 3504 1 11:40 ? 00:00:12 /usr/lib/vmware/hostd/vmware-hostd /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml -u

You can now kill the process by:

kill -9 <PID> (e.g. kill -9 3545)

You should then be able to restart the mgmt-vmware service. By this time, it should already be running and you will see a list like the one below…

[root@esx01]# service mgmt-vmware restart
Stopping VMware ESX Server Management services:
VMware ESX Server Host Agent Watchdog                   [  OK ]
VMware ESX Server Host Agent                            [  OK ]
Starting VMware ESX Server Management services:
VMware ESX Server Host Agent (background)               [  OK ]
Availability report startup (background)                [  OK ]

Next I would execute the command below.

[root@server]# service vmware-vpxa restart
Stopping vmware-vpxa:                                      [  OK ]
Starting vmware-vpxa:                                      [  OK ]
[root@esx01]#

After that you should be able to run commands against the console.

Vmware-cmd -l should now return you a list of running VMs.

-NS