Symptoms
ESXi hosts shows not-responding on the vCenter.The hostd service intermittently becomes unresponsive.In vmkernel.log you will see alerts such as
2020-11-03T22:05:00.557Z cpu2:2179102)ALERT: hostd detected to be non-responsive
You may observe the following entries preceding the hostd detected to be non-responsive.
2020-11-03T21:30:38.333Z cpu7:2098766 opID=b3d57165)FS3J: 3146: Aborting txn (0x430aa50d2890) callerID: 0xc1d00002 due to failure pre-committing: Optimistic lock acquired by another host. 2020-11-03T21:33:40.220Z cpu7:2097782)DVFilter: 6054: Checking disconnected filters for timeouts 2020-11-03T21:34:53.733Z cpu6:2202506)DLX: 4330: vol 'datastore', lock at 188628992: [Req mode 1] Checking liveness: 2020-11-03T21:34:53.733Z cpu6:2202506)[type 10c00002 offset 188628992 v 4266, hb offset 3346432 gen 7313, mode 1, owner 5fa01ff9-a25c7506-a069-00108682abde mtime 544318 num 0 gblnum 0 gblgen 0 gblbrk 0]Note:The preceding log excerpts are only examples.Date,time and environmental variables may vary depending on your environment.
Purpose
To avoid ESXi host not-responding state.
Cause
In rare cases, a race condition of multiple threads attempting to create a file and remove the directory at the same directory might cause a deadlock that fails the hostd service.Such a deadlock might affect other services as well, but the race condition window is small, and the issue is not frequent.
Impact / Risks
The service restores only after a restart of the ESXi host.
Resolution
This issue is resolved in:VMware ESXi 6.7 Patch 04 (build number 17167734) - Patch Release ESXi670-202011002VMware ESXi 7.0 Update 1c (build number 17325551) - Patch Release Update 1c
Workaround
Use any of the below workaroundsIdentify if there is any stale dvport files. For example, from vCenter, the vDS may only contain 100 ports but there may be 200 dvport files under the .dvsData/DVS UUID/ directory.If there are stale dvport files, unregister virtual machines from vCenter residing on that datastore then delete the .dvsData folder and after 5 mintues, they will be regenerated.OrMove the ESXi hosts to different vDS.
Related Information
For more information refer to VMware KBRefer also to vDS config location and HA blog
