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)

Only restart single services.

NOTE: Restarting ESXi management agents may:

• cause temporary disruptions
• can lead to system instability requiring a host reboot
• 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'