ESX/ESXi hosts are sporadically disconnected from vCenter Server due to hostd failure

Products

• VMware

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Random ESX/ESXi hosts intermittently disconnect from vCenter Server
• hostd fails sporadically
• vpxa shuts down because it is unable to establish a connection to hostd
• In the vpxa logs, you see entries similar to:
  
  [2011-07-05 09:43:46.903 F712DB90 error 'App'] [VpxaInvtHost] Can't connect to hostd/serverd. Shutting down...
  [2011-07-05 09:43:46.903 F712DB90 info 'App'] [Vpxa] Shutting down now
  

• The hostd.log is terminated without mentioning rotating...
• watchdog logs report messages similar to these in /var/log/messages:
  
  watchdog-hostd: '/usr/sbin/vmware-hostd /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml -u' exited after 3125299 seconds 134
  

• You may see hostd core(s) generated under /var/core/core-vix-async-pipe-pid-EPOCH.gz
• The /var/log/vmware/hostd-support.tgz file may be available, which contains the last message from hostd similar to:

[2011-07-05 09:43:46.346 F639C900 verbose 'App'] [Search::GetInfo] Successfully opened disk: /vmfs/volumes/xxxx.../.snapshot/PATH/VM/DISK.vmdk
[2011-07-05 09:43:46.439 F639C900 info 'DiskLib'] DISKLIB-VMFS : Failed to stat backing file "/vmfs/volumes/xxxx.../.snapshot/PATH/VM/DISK-flat.vmdk": The system cannot find the file specified (ok if doing migrate).
[2011-07-05 09:43:46.439 F639C900 info 'DiskLib'] DISKLIB-LIB : Failed to get info : The system cannot find the file specified (25).

Resolution

VMware is aware of this issue.

This issue is resolved in ESXi 4.1 Update 3 and ESXi 5.0 Update 1.

To download ESXi 4.1 Update 3 or ESXi 5.0 Update1, see the VMware Download Center.

Additional Information

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