Hi,

Our work is starting to look at VMware ESXi server and I thought it would be nice to play around with the technology at home.  I recently downloaded the free version of VMware ESXi 5.1 and installed it on a computer that I wasn't using.  The install went without an issue and rebooted to the standard yellow screen.  I checked the settings for the management interface and everything looked fine to me.

I downloaded the VMware vSphere Client, installed it and then tried to connect to the ESXi host.  I entered the IP address of the server, the root username and the password I selected during install.  When I clicked the Login button, it asked me about the certificate which I ignored and then I got this error message:

I tried accessing the web interface by going to http://<server IP address> which redirected me to https://<server IP address> and again mentioned the certificate.  I accepted the warning and then was presented with a page that simply said:

503 Service Unavailable

Doing some digging, I used the console on the server and enabled SSH.  I used PuTTY to connect to the IP address of the host and accepted the certificate.  I used root as the username and the password I selected during install and was able to get to the command prompt.  There doesn't appear to be any issues with communicating with the ESXi host from a network point of view.

I started doing some research on 503 Service Unavailable and 503 Server Unavailable but the problems that I saw others having seemed to be more related to upgrades rather than a new install.  Some people were able to resolve their issues by restarting the management agents from the console under the Troubleshooting Mode Options.  I did that with no change.  I also rebooted the server many times and even reinstalled it several times.  The results always seemed to remain the same.

I started looking through the log files to see if I could see something obvious.  On one of the VMware KB articles, I was able to find out the command to check if the hostd was running.  It turns out in my case it wasn't:

~ # /etc/init.d/hostd status
hostd is not running.

I tried to manually stop hostd and start it:

~ # /etc/init.d/hostd stop
hostd is not running.
~ # /etc/init.d/hostd start
Unable to verify hostd started after 10 seconds
hostd started.

And here is what is logged in syslog.log:

2012-12-24T16:29:01Z watchdog-hostd: [10600] Begin 'hostd ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=hostd /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml', min-uptime = 60, max-quick-failures = 1, max-total-failures = 1000000, bg_pid_file = ''
2012-12-24T16:29:01Z watchdog-hostd: Executing 'hostd ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=host/vim/vmvisor/hostd /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml'
2012-12-24T16:29:01Z watchdog-hostd: 'hostd ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=host/vim/vmvisor/hostd /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml' exited after 0 seconds (quick failure 1) 127
2012-12-24T16:29:01Z watchdog-hostd: Executing 'hostd ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=host/vim/vmvisor/hostd /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml'
2012-12-24T16:29:02Z watchdog-hostd: 'hostd ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=host/vim/vmvisor/hostd /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml' exited after 1 seconds (quick failure 2) 127
2012-12-24T16:29:02Z watchdog-hostd: End 'hostd ++min=0,swapscope=system,group=hostd /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml', failure limit reached
2012-12-24T16:29:11Z watchdog-hostd: Unable to verify hostd started after 10 seconds
2012-12-24T16:30:01Z crond[2476]: crond: USER root pid 10855 cmd /sbin/hostd-probe

I'm not super familiar with ESXi 5.1 but it looks like to me that the watchdog-hostd says that it is trying to start hostd using the configuration file located at /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml which then exists with "(quick failure 1) 127".  It then looks it tries to start hostd again and then again exists with "(quick failure 2) 127" which then quits with "failure limit reached".

The log file for /var/log/hostd.log is completely empty.  When I was researching hostd not starting, it appears for others there are error messages in this log file which helped guide them to a solution but in my case there is nothing.

I've attached the entire syslog.log file for the first startup while running these commands.  I've also attached the messages reported in syslog.log for just the part where I restarted the management agents.

I'd really like to try and get ESXi 5.1 up and running so that I can start playing around with it but I'm at a loss as to what I can try next to figure out why hostd fails to start everytime, even after a fresh install.  Can anyone suggest something that I can do to help either resolve the issue or at the least figure out what the problem might be?

Thank you.