We had this issue, which for us was caused by the fact that VC was trying to manage it whilst we were also doing stuff in the MUI. Rebooting the box fixed it for us.

E

Hello, TomVDB.
VMotion won't work, if serverd process is down.

My organization has about 40 ESX systems, all production system on 8 or 16 CPU's server.
When we have upgrade ESX from 2.5.1 to 2.5.2 version we have randomly this problem on our systems.

Tom,

what h/w are you running on?
What version/patch of ESX?
What happened when you tried to kill the serverd?
Ever checked top on SC?

We had a similiar problem intermittantly on Dell boxes, running into an runtime issue with the megaraid2 driver.

Upgrading to 2.5.3. p3 resolved the issue.

I have found a possible solution to this problem.

Kill the vmware-serverd process FIRST then restart the httpd.vmware process. I had also previously restarted the xinetd process.

1. Find the process ID for vmware-ccagent (or vmware-serverd). Run ps -A

2. Kill the process using kill -9 nnn, where nnn is the process ID noted in the previous step.

3. Start the http daemon. Run /etc/init.d/httpd.vmware restart.

I was able to log into the GUI Successfully.

I originally had a vm win2003 server that was locked and would not shutdown. I started by killing the process id for the vm. That didnt seem to solve that problem and may have caused this problem with the gui. I then used pstree -p and found all the processes associated with it and killed them. I then followed the above steps and now all is back to normal of course now I have to find out why the vm went bad.

That worked for me!
Had a problem with my ubuntu box last night whilst moving to raid 1 boot disk. Everything was fine until I rebooted during the rebuild. I got a kernel panic and didn't know what caused it. Rebuilt the server and lost my other raid disks, no partitions showed for any of the disks! Had to fdisk them again, mount the md devices and run e2fsck on them. Took most of the night but working again now.
During all of this I had to change the ip settings on my laptop so I could use google without my normal windows dns server, so once I got it up and running this morning I put my ip back to dhcp which caused my vmware console to disconnect (naturally). The only problem was that I couldn't reconnect to it anymore. Following the instructions shown above has worked and I can now get it.
Many thanks

Hi All,

I am also got the same problem on one of my ESX (2.5.2 build 20193).

Just i have done the following.

#service xinetd restart

#service httpd.vmware restart

Thats it. Then I am able to login into it.

Regards,
Rajesh