Admins Handbook

You lost connection to the ESX 3,5 host using the vmware infrastructure client.
Now you want to restart the management agent to get it up and running again.
But for some reason the command “service mgmt-vmware restart” does not complete.
Restarting the host and its local running virtual servers is not an option, so what do you do.

Try this:
service pegasus stop
service mgmt-vmware stop
These commands may take some minutes.

ps -e f |grep vmware-watchdog
ps -e f |grep mgmt

Kill all processes you find:
kill -9 processid

Start the services (wait two minuets):
service mgmt-vmware start; sleep 1; service pegasus start

If it does not work try this instead:
service pegasus stop; service mgmt-vmware stop; sleep 30; service mgmt-vmware start; service pegasus start

—
service network restart.
—

vmware has a KB about this issue regerding:
mgmt-vmware restart script might not finish restarting the hostd
mgmt-vmware restart script does not finish restart the hostd.
The script gets stuck when stopping the service.
The SSH session to the ESX host becomes unresponsive.

KB ID: 1005566