Hi community,
We are also having the same issue, yet we don't have the EMC Control Center software querying our ESX hosts... while this probably consumes memory, this is for sure not the only reason why people are seeing the soft/hard limit getting hit.
We noticed something interesting in our test & production environments. Every time we vMotion a new virtual machine (i.e. one that did not previously run on that particular host) onto a host, the hostd process memory usage increases by 1 MB, sometimes 2 MB of RAM. When we move the virtual machine away, the memory is not released. In our production clusters (and we have several of those), we have way over 200 VM's, so in combination with heavy load and DRS, it is very possible that a lot of virtual machines visit many hosts... leading to hitting the hostd memory barrier.
It is not clear to us why there would be such a thing as a "memory hard limit". Is this to disguise a memory leak? Just let the process' memory usage grow and when it gets to large, kill it to start over again? We did notice that on a restart, the hostd memory usage climbs up to 70 MB (as a starting value) + 1MB (sometimes 2MB) per VM running on that host... thus clearing the "history memory usage" of previously visited machines for the hostd proces.
That is a workaround that we are implementing now, but unfortunately, sometimes the hostd process refuses to start again, leading to multiple hostd processes running on the ESX host... which goes totally bananas at that point. We have a SR currently open but there is not really much progress there.
