There’s running an interesting discussion on the VMware communities. It looks like the hostd is trying to eat-up more than 200 MB of memory. Please comment on Andreas Peetz’s post is you know what’s going wrong.
since we updated our ESX hosts from ESX 3.5 Update 2 to ESX 3.5 Update 3 (+ Dec 2008 patches) we experience an abnormally high RAM usage of the hostd management process on the hosts.
The symptoms are that hostd hits its default hard memory limit of 200 MB and shuts itself down. This is indicated by the following error message in var/log/vmware/hostd.log:
[2009-01-06 06:25:47.707 'Memory checker' 19123120 error] Current value 207184 exceeds hard limit 204800. Shutting down process.
Update : For now the bottom line is: *Don't let EMC Controlcenter query your ESX hosts if they are on 3.5 Update 3*.
That why i wait at least 3 months or more before implementing a new release of esx these days. In the past Vmware was rock solid, but now they make a lot of errors.
U3 also has an old bug back, maintenance mode not working correctly with 2 esx hosts.
Check it out: http://www.jume.nl/articles/vmware/134-getting-vmware-hostd-memory-usage