ESXi hostd management daemon crashes on ESXi/vSAN 8.x nodes with vmdk flat files

Products

• VMware vSAN
• VMware Cloud on AWS

Issue/Introduction

ESXi hostd management daemon crashes on ESXi/vSAN 8.x nodes in on-premises environments and VMC on AWS SDDC versions 1.20v1 through 1.20v4 when using Citrix XenDesktop or other Virtual Desktop applications that deploy Virtual Machines with flat VMDK files.

Error symptoms

• Repeated hostd service crashes
• Unexpected storage consumption in vSAN datastore
• Management operations may fail on affected hosts

Verification steps

1. Verify the presence of -flat.vmdk files in the vSAN datastore
2. Confirm increased storage consumption that doesn't match expected VM usage

Environment

VMware vSAN 8.0.x

Cause

Citrix XenDesktop and other products that deploy flat vmdk files onto VSAN storage cause the hostd process to crash while trying to read those files.

In VSAN's object-based storage, -flat.vmdk and -delta.vmdk files are not directly addressable as datastore paths. Please see KB315551.

Resolution

1. Remove flat files and restart hostd
   • Remove all -flat.vmdk files from the vSAN datastore
   • Restart the hostd service on affected hosts
2. Upgrade to a fixed version
   • For on-premises environments: Upgrade to vSphere 8.0 U1 or later
   • For VMC on AWS: Upgrade to SDDC version 1.20v5 or later
   • For Citrix environments: Apply the fix referenced in Citrix article CTX131239

Note: If hostd continues to crash after removing flat files, comment out the problematic VMDK in the VMX descriptor file before restarting hostd again.

Additional Information

If the error persists after following these steps, contact Broadcom Support for further assistance.

Please provide the below information when opening a support request with Broadcom for this issue

• vCenter logs
• ESXi logs