How to restart management agents on ESXi host

When you cannot connect to ESXi from the vSphere client, manage it from vCenter or you receive this error from vCenter “Virtual machine creation may fail because agent is unable to retrieve VM creation options from the host” you will need to restart the management agents from the ESXi host.

You can restart the management agents using the Direct Console User Interface:

• Connect to the console of the ESXi host
• Press F2 to customize the host and log in as root.
• Go to Troubleshooting Options and choose Restart Management Agents

The other options, which is faster, is to SSH into the ESXi host and run the following commands:

/etc/init.d/hostd restart

/etc/init.d/vpxa restart

Don’t forget that before SSH into the ESXi, you need to enable ESXi shell or SSH.

In order to that you have to go to Host configuration > Security profile and from there you can start the ESXi shell and SSH service.