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Virtual machines display as invalid in vCenter Server
Symptoms
Virtual machines display as invalid in vCenter Server
The command service mgmt-vmware restart fails to stop the management agents
The command vmware-cmd -l returns the error:
PANIC: SyncWaitQ: The system limit on the total number of open files has been reached
The commandps -auxwww shows a large amount of SSHD processes running
Resolution
This issue may occur if SSHD is running too many processes.
To resolve this issue, determine what is causing SSHD to spawn too many processes and kill the SSHD processes:
Check how many SSHD processes are running with the command: lsof | grep sshd -c
Check how many SSHD connections are logged with the command:
grep "Connection from" message* | grep sshd -c
Determine which IPs are causing SSHD connections with the command:
grep "Connection from" message* | less
Based on the output from Step 3, look up the IP that is causing the SSHD connections with the command:
nslookup xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
To kill all SSHD processes, run this command.
killall sshd
The command in step 5 kills all current SSH sessions onto this ESX host. After you run the command, log into the ESX host using KVM or direct access to the console.
