Restarting the Management agents in ESXi

Symptoms

• Cannot connect directly to the ESXi host or manage under vCenter server.
• vCenter Server displays the error:
  
  Virtual machine creation may fail because agent is unable to retrieve VM creation options from the host

Purpose

For troubleshooting ESXi connectivity issue, restart the management agents on your ESXi host.

Warning: If LACP is configured on the VSAN network, do not restart management agents on ESXi hosts running Virtual SAN.

• Restarting the management agents may impact any tasks that are running on the ESXi host at the time of the restart.
• Check for any storage issues before restarting the Host deamon hostd service or services.sh

Resolution

Restart Management agents in ESXi Using Direct Console User Interface (DCUI):

1. Connect to the console of your ESXi host.
2. Press F2 to customize the system.
3. Log in as root.
4. Use the Up/Down arrows to navigate to Troubleshooting Options > Restart Management Agents.
5. Press Enter.
6. Press F11 to restart the services.
7. When the service restarts, press Enter.
8. Press Esc to log out.

Restart Management agents in ESXi Using ESXi Shell or Secure Shell (SSH):

1. Log in to ESXi Shell or SSH as root.
   
   
2. Restart the ESXi host daemon and vCenter Agent services using these commands:
   
   /etc/init.d/hostd restart
   
   /etc/init.d/vpxa restart

Note: In ESXi 4.x, run this command to restart the vpxa agent:

service vmware-vpxa restart

Alternatively:

 

• To reset the management network on a specific VMkernel interface, by default vmk0, run the command:
  
  esxcli network ip interface set -e false -i vmk0; esxcli network ip interface set -e true -i vmk0
  
  Note: Using a semicolon (;) between the two commands ensures the VMkernel interface is disabled and then re-enabled in succession. If the management interface is not running on vmk0, change the above command according to the VMkernel interface used.
  
  
• To restart all management agents on the host, run the command:
  
  services.sh restart

Caution:

• If LACP is enabled and configured, do not restart management services using services.sh command. Instead restart independent services using the /etc/init.d/module restart command.
• If the issue is not resolved, and you are restarting all the services that are a part of the services.sh script, take a downtime before proceeding to the script.