Hostd Crashed Due to "Memory Exceeds Hard Limit" Panic on ESXi Host

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• vCenter shows an alert as below during the host crash:
  
  Connections to the Host Dropped: /bin/hostd crashed (1 time(s) so far) and a core file might have been created at /var/core/hostd-zdump.000. This might have caused connections to the host to be dropped.
  
  
• PSOD snippet will look like below:
  
  

        #2  0x000000f529ddc564 in Vmacore::PanicExit (msg=msg@entry=0xf529eacb78 "Memory exceeds hard limit. Panic") at bora/vim/lib/vmacore/posix/panic.cpp:193
        #3  0x000000f529bbb831 in Vmacore::System::ResourceChecker::DoCheck (this=0xf541086b20) at bora/vim/lib/vmacore/system/ResourceChecker.cpp:149

Environment

Product: VMware vSphere

Version: ESXi 7.0 (specifically Update 3n)

Cause

The hostd service crashed because the process exceeded its configured memory hard limit. This is a known issue in ESXi 7.0 Update 3n.

Resolution

This issue has been resolved in ESXi 7.0 Update 3o and later versions. To prevent further occurrences:

Upgrade to ESXi 7.0 Update 3o or newer.

Additional Information

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vsphere/vsphere/7-0/release-notes/esxi-update-and-patch-release-notes/vsphere-esxi-70u3o-release-notes.html