VMware ESX Server Host Agent Stalled

From time to time the management and host agents running on an ESX host may need a restart.

This is normally a pretty safe procedure. However very rarely (I have found), a restart of the host agent may fail,

Example output

Stopping VMware ESX Server Management services:

VMware ESX Server Host Agent Watchdog OK
VMware ESX Server Host Agent

To resolve this without an outage to the guest machines, start another SSH session

service mgmt-VMware status

VMware-hostd (pid XXXX) is running…

This will confirm the service is running.

From here, identify the host process by using grep

ps -ef | grep vmware-hostd

then kill the process using the kill command

kill -9

From here, restart the managment services again. This should allow the host to reconnect to the virtualcentre.