Sometime restarting management service on the host will not restart the “hostd ” service. It is in hung state or the script gets stuck when stopping the service. It may happen that the SSH session to the ESX host becomes unresponsive. To restart this without restarting the host follow below steps.
cd /var/run/vmware
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 file vmware-hostd.PID:# cat vmware-hostd.PID. For example, [root@vmware]
cat vmware-hostd.PID (1191[root@vmware])
Use the resulting PID to kill the process. Caution: Type the kill -9 command carefully, it kills the process of the supplied PID without exception or confirmation.
kill -9 1191
Delete the vmware-hostd.PID and watchdog-hostd.PID files:
rm vmware-hostd.PID watchdog-hostd.PID
Restart the management service, run: service mgmt-vmware restart