Service mgmt-vmware restart may not restart hostd ...... Issue Fixed

Symptoms

The command service mgmt-vmware restart does not restart hostd.
The script gets stuck when stopping the service.
The SSH session to the ESX host becomes unresponsive.
hostd fails to restart.
Neither the ./sbin/services.sh restart command nor the ./etc/init.d/hostd restart on an ESXi host will restart hostd successfully.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, you must manually stop the stuck service and then restart it.

To stop the service and restart it:

Log in as root to the ESX host command-line via the physical console or via KVM connection.
Navigate to the /var/run/vmware directory with the command:

# cd /var/run/vmware
Run this command to list the files vmware-hostd.PID and watchdog-hostd.PID :

# ls -l vmware-hostd.PID watchdog-hostd.PID
Determine the Process ID (PID) management service. View the contents of the vmware-hostd.PID file with the command:

# cat vmware-hostd.PID

For example:

[root@vmware]# cat vmware-hostd.PID
1191[root@vmware]#
Use the resulting PID to kill the process.

Caution: Use the kill -9 command with care. It kills the process of the supplied PID without exception or confirmation.

# kill -9 <PID>

In this example, you run kill -9 1191 .
Delete the vmware-hostd.PID and watchdog-hostd.PID files with the command:

# rm vmware-hostd.PID watchdog-hostd.PID
Start the management service:

Notes:

This issue may also occur if the /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml is blank or has invalid entries. If a backup of the config.xml exists in the same directory the issue may be resolved by replacing the config.xml with this backup file.
This issue also occurs if the /etc/vmware/hostd/proxy.xml file is empty or has invalid entries. This issue may be resolved by copying the proxy.xml file from a working host and then restarting the hostd service.

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