ESXi hosts intermittently disconnect from Active Directory or vCenter due to Likewise memory leak.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

Users may experience intermittent disconnections of ESXi hosts from the Active Directory domain or from vCenter Server. This behavior is often accompanied by the host becoming non-responsive.

Symptoms include:

• ESXi hosts disconnecting from Active Directory.

• ESXi hosts disconnecting from vCenter.

• Memory exhaustion regarding the likewise process.

Environment

VMware ESXi 8.x

Cause

This issue is caused by memory leaks that occur in the Likewise agent during Active Directory operations or if smart card authentication is active on the ESXi host. As a result of the leak, Likewise processes may eventually run out of available memory, causing the disconnections and instability.

Resolution

This issue is resolved in VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 3h.

To resolve this issue, please upgrade your ESXi hosts to version 8.0 Update 3h or later.

Additional Information

To verify if you are experiencing this specific issue, review the following log files for the error patterns below:

1. /var/log/vmkernel.log You will see memory admission failure messages indicating the likewise process is out of resources:

yyyy-mm-dd In(182) vmkernel: cpu72:2110465)uw.2110464 (44739) requires 1024 KB, asked 1024 KB from likewise (792) which has 93112 KB occupied and 72 KB available.

yyyy-mm-dd In(182) vmkernel: cpu72:2110465)Admission failure in path: host/vim/vmvisor/likewise:lwsmd.2110464:uw.2110464

2. hostd-probe.log You may see indications that the host daemon is unresponsive:

hostd detected to be non-responsive.