I think the problem could be the HP hardware and the current bug with the CIM agent reporting to VMware Health Status a ProcHot warning. This disussion claims no fix for the bug yet.: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/159063?tstart=0&start=0

I have just filed an SR on Monday to resolve the same issue you are seeing where hostd hits a hard limit. Our VMware support person is suggesting that SCSI reservation errors may be partly to blame, because we have a lot of disk contention during our backups at night. Customer has many vRanger backups and vReplicator backups going at the same time. We have not yet cut back on the backups or Svmotioned VMs to new LUNS to resolve the contention issue, so I'm not sure if that is the problem or not.

Are there any HP Intell server people seeing this same bug? Is anyone else for that matter seeing this bug that doesn't have HP AMD servers?

Will report back with what I find out...

Sean Clark - http://seanclark.us - http://twitter.com/vseanclark