ESX communicates with virtual center through what is loosely described as, “management agents”. When you hear TSE’s talk about “management agents”, we’re really talking about 3 things: vpxa, hostd, and vpxd
Vpxa lives on the ESX host (on the service console), it communicates with hostd. It’s mostly a listener service, and is very rarely an issue. Hostd lives on the ESX host (on the service console). This is the lion, the vast majority of “disconnects” indicate a problem with hostd, and vpxd lives on your virtual center server. These 3 services form a communications chain, and failure of one or more of these services, tends to produce “disconnects”.
Restarting the Management agents on an ESX or ESXi Server
To restart the management agents on ESX host:
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Log in to your ESX Server as root from either an SSH session or directly from the console of the server.
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Type “service mgmt-vmware restart”.
Caution: Ensure Automatic Startup/Shutdown of virtual machines is disabled before running this command or you risk rebooting the virtual machines. -
Press Enter.
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Type “service vmware-vpxa restart”.
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Press Enter.
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Type “logout” and press Enter to disconnect from the ESX host.
To restart the management agents on ESXi:
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Connect to the console of your ESXi Server.
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Press F2 to customize the system.
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Login as “root”.
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Using the Up/Down arrows navigate to Restart Management Agents.
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Press Enter.
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Press F11 to restart the services.
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When the service has been restarted, press Enter.
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Press Esc to logout of the system.
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