ESXi hosts lose Management IP address in iDrac and esxcli commands will fail with "MemoryError" in VxRail environments

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

ESXi hosts running in VxRail environments will intermittently lose their management IP address

New SSH connections to the host will fail and established SSH sessions will return "MemoryError" when commands are run

Environment

ESXi 7.x

Cause

This issue is caused by a memory leak from the VxRail manager node 

You will see these memory errors in the logs of an effected host 

vmkernel

2025-07-30T10:17:46.275Z cpu64:27968077)uw.27968077 (217345072) extraMin/extraFromParent: 64/64, ssh (670) childEmin/eMinLimit: 204795/204800
2025-07-30T10:17:46.275Z cpu64:27968077)Admission failure in path: host/vim/vimuser/terminal/ssh:python.27968077:uw.27968077
2025-07-30T10:17:46.275Z cpu64:27968077)UserWorld 'python' with cmdline 'python /bin/esxcli'

vmkwarning 

2025-07-30T06:41:21.602Z cpu64:27747265)WARNING: User: 4679: vsish: Error in exec'd cartel setup: Failed to map section: Admission check failed for memory resource
2025-07-30T06:41:21.602Z cpu64:27747265)WARNING: LinuxFileDesc: 6535: vsish: Unrecoverable exec failure: Failure during exec while original state already lost
2025-07-30T06:41:21.602Z cpu62:27747264)WARNING: World: 2706: Could not allocate new world handle for world ID: 27747267: Admission check failed for memory resource
2025-07-30T06:41:21.602Z cpu62:27747264)WARNING: LinuxThread: 424: sh: Error cloning thread: -12 (bad0014)

 

Using a grep command to search for ongoing sessions from to the host you will note VxRail processes that have ongoing SSH session with the host

ps -cu | grep sh | less 

 

You can also search for ssh connections direclty using the command bellow and the IP Address of the VxRail manager IP 

esxcli network ip connection list | grep "VxRail_Manager_IP" | wc -l

This may return a list of many established and ongoing ssh sessions from VxRail to the effected ESXi host 

 

 

 

 

Resolution

To resolve in the short term you can reboot the VxRail manager node

However the issue will re-occur so a case should be opened with DELL to review and find the cause of the issue