hostd detected to be non-responsive

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

• ESXi /var/run/log/hostd-probe.log reports hostd to be non-responsive but the subsequent requests are successful:
  
  hostd detected to be non-responsive
Util: ForkExec(/bin/vmkbacktrace -d /var/run/log/ -n hostd -o hostd-probed% -a 5) <hostd process id>
Publishing a report after running the test
Successfully sent health report
  
  
• ESXi /var/run/log/hostd.log also reports connection timeout and hostd to be non-responsive:
  
  HTTP Connection has timed out while waiting for further requests
......
Issue detected on <hostname> in ha-datacenter: hostd detected to be non-responsive
  
  
• /var/run/log/syslog.log states a hostd dump is generated: 
  
  Creating trace file /var/run/log/hostd-probed-#######-####.dmp

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Cause

The hostd-probe tool that's used to check hostd liveness hit a rare race condition and mistakenly considers hostd to be unresponsive. Hostd is in fact running and fully functional and even reports the error. 

Resolution

There's no issue with hostd in the environment. This is a false alarm and can be ignored.

Engineering is aware of the issue and in progress of providing a fix to prevent this false alarm from being generated.