Quite often when upgrading customer systems, after upgrading VirtualCenter to 2.5 - it will install a new agent onto the host. Sometime it works, sometimes it doesn't
For the times it fails, you can usually restart the mgmt-VMware service and it will be ok again. But quite often the agent says its stopped, but when you restart it says "(background)" on the end. Which seems to mean that it didn't stop running the last time. Here's an example:
service mgmt-vmware stop
Stopping VMware ESX Server Management services:
VMware ESX Server Host Agent Services
VMware ESX Server Host Agent Watchdog
service mgmt-vmware status
vmware-hostd (pid 2916) is running...
service mgmt-vmware start
Starting VMware ESX Server Management services:
VMware ESX Server Host Agent (background)
Availability report startup (background)
Notice, that after stopping it - it still says its running - so when you restart it, you get the (background) message.
Things i've tried or aware of:
/tmp/vmware-root exists.
service vmware-vpxa restart
service vmware-vmkauthd restart
service xinetd restart
service mgmt-vmware restart
kill -9 of the pid for the vmware-hostd
The only way to get things working again is to reboot the host, which is a major pain because the VM's are running on the server and you can VMotion them off - because the agent isn't running.
If there is no solution to this, is there a way of preventing the new agents getting automatically pushed to the ESX hosts on startup of VC after an upgrade. Because if you could prevent that, i could evacuate each ESX host before upgrading the agent - if it fails, i can reboot with no disruption.