Restarting Management Agents in ESXi

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Procedure to restart the management agents on an ESXi host.

Warning:

 

Do not use the services.sh restart command or Restart Management agents in ESXi Using Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) On ESXi hosts:

• If you are running vSAN
• If Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) is in use
• If NSX is configured in the environment
• If you are using shared graphics in a View environment (VGPU, vDGA, vSGA)

Features such as the ones listed above depend on running services on ESXI hosts and restarting management agents may cause temporary disruptions.

Restarting the host management agents may impact currently running tasks, including impacting performance on the guest virtual machines of that host.

Environment

• VMware ESXi Server 7.x.
• VMware ESXi Server 8.x.
• VMware ESXi Server 9.x.

Resolution

Restart management agents in ESXi using the Host Client:

1. In the ESXi Host Client, select Host > Manage > Services and select the service (vpxa or hostd) to restart

Restart management agents in ESXi Using ESXi Shell or Secure Shell (SSH):

1. Log in to ESXi Shell or SSH as root
2. Run:
   

   /etc/init.d/hostd restart
   /etc/init.d/vpxa restart

Additional Information

Run this command to verify NSX for vSphere is installed on an ESXi host:
  

esxcli software vib list | grep -E 'nsx|vsipfwlib'