Caution: Use the kill -9 command with care. It kills the process of the supplied PID without exception or confirmation.
# kill -9 <PID>
In this example, you run kill -9 1191.
Delete the vmware-hostd.PID and watchdog-hostd.PID files with the command:
# rm vmware-hostd.PID watchdog-hostd.PID
Start the management service:
For ESX, run the command:
# service mgmt-vmware start
For ESXi, run the command:
# /etc/init.d/hostd start
Notes:
This issue may also occur if the /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml is blank or has invalid entries. If a backup of the config.xml exists in the same directory the issue may be resolved by replacing the config.xml with this backup file.
This issue also occurs if the /etc/vmware/hostd/proxy.xml file is empty or has invalid entries. This issue may be resolved by copying the proxy.xml file from a working host and then restarting the hostd service.
Additional Information
Note: Messages similar to the following may be reported in the hostd.log when the proxy.xml file is empty.
[2012-07-30 04:13:26.764 FFFCAE80 verbose 'App'] Plugin 9 statically linked [2012-07-30 04:13:26.764 FFFCAE80 info 'Proxysvc'] Proxy config filepath is /etc/vmware/hostd/proxy.xml [2012-07-30 04:13:26.765 FFFCAE80 panic 'App'] error: no element found [2012-07-30 04:13:26.765 FFFCAE80 panic 'App'] backtrace: [00] rip 16d00c33 [01] rip 16b9303e [02] rip 16b327a2
