vCenter server hostname shows localhost. and the vpxd service is stopped

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

The vCenter Server service is stopped, and the vCenter Server VM's name has been changed to localhost.

The VPXD is creating coredumps, and the service is not stable

The VAPI process is showing 100% CPU consumption when running vimtop:

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 8.0.x

Cause

The failure is due to an XML syntax error in the etc/vmware-vpx/vpxd.cg

VDT shows this error:

Disabled Plugins: NoneWARNING!  FAILED TO PARSE VPXD>CFG. Trace: Traceback (most recent call last):

    File "/tmp/vdt-2.2.6_10-21-2025/vcenter/vc_scripts/vc_info.py", line 84, in SDDCManaged

        vpxd = xml.parse("/etc/vmware-vpx/vpxd.cfg")

File "/usr/lib/python3.10/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 1222, in parse

tree.parse(source, parser)

File "usr/lib/python3.10/xml/etree/ElementTree.py", line 580, in parse

self._root = parser._parse_whole(source)

xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: not well-formed (invalid token): line 45, column 7

Resolution

To resolve the issue 

SSH to the vcenter server using root credentials:

• Back up the vpxd.cfg file 
• cp /etc/vmware-vpx/vpxd.cfg /root/vpxd.cfg.bak

cd /etc/vmware-vpx  less -N vpxd.cfg to verify the incorrect values at line 45

Run the following command to correct it:

• sed '/<vcls>/,/<\/vcls>/d' -i /etc/vmware-vpx/vpxd.cfg

Restart the vcenter server services

Additional Information

Reference KB articles:

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/316514/how-to-disable-vcls-on-a-cluster-via-ret.html

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?legacyId=82751