I have an ESX4 server that disconnected itself from virtualcenter. I went in and ran "service mgmt-vmware restart" and the command hung for about 3 hours, I eventually had to go in and try to kill the vmware-hostd by issuing the kill -9 command. After that I restarted the mgmt-vmware service however could not get the server to connect to either the VIC or VC server. I issued the "service mgmt-vmware restart" command again and it restarted the service, however, I noticed that it did not kill the vmware-hostd process it just created a new one. I've tried stopping the mgmt-vmware service, which say's it works, however, it doesn't kill the process and will create a new one when you start the service back. I've tried running kill -9 against the PID's and no success.
I'm stuck with multiple hostd process' and no connectivity to VC. I have about 12 running VM's on this server and they are all running. I really do not want to reboot the server. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Best Answer
I ran into just about the same exact problem on an ESX 3.5 box recently. Please note my instructions are for 3.5 due to not having a 4 server around right now. the commands shouldn't be too far off
you are probably going to have to reboot the host
For me my sand dropped out from under the server for about 2 seconds while it was in the middle of a vmotion - lemmie tell you it doesn't like that.
if you do have to reboot you can try the following commands to attempt a clean shutdown if you have a current version of vmware tools installed
Get all of the running hosts and the path to their vmx files
vmware-cmd -lYou'll get something like:
vmware-cmd <path_to_vmx> stop softand example would be:
Once everything is down, go ahead and reboot the host.