Hello all,

we finally identified the trigger for the increased RAM usage of hostd: It's not the HPIM agent, but the queries of the EMC Controlcenter Agent software.

No software is installed for this inside the service consoles; we just created a user with administrative rights on each ESX host that is used for remote logins by EMC Controlcenter.

This morning at 4:00 AM the user logged in and ran its queries (which obviously involves browsing all datastores) and logged out at around 6:15 AM. During this time hostd RAM usage climbed from 90 MB to 212 MB. Before and after the user's login hostd RAM usage stayed nearly unchanged.

Please note that this problem did NOT occur with ESX 3.5 Update 2, although we already used EMC Controlcenter then. It started with our upgrade to ESX 3.5 Update 3, and the EMC Controlcenter software was not changed recently.

You can find more information on EMC Controlcenter here:

We have suspended the EMC Controlcenter queries for now, thus eliminating the cause of the problem, and I asked VMware support how to proceed with this issue.

I will post any more information here. For now the bottom line is: Don't let EMC Controlcenter query your ESX hosts if they are on 3.5 Update 3.

Andreas