vSphere Client could not connect to IP (The operation has timed out)

We had an issue today where we were unable to logon 
to a ESX host via the vSphere Client.

These were the sort of error messages I was getting.


I spent a lot of time on Google, which lead me to many different knowledge base articles, which were 
not related to the issue I was having.

Most were relating to file locks on the database on the
ESX host, but the errors didn’t tie up with the logs on the ESX host.

I ran Wireshark, and could see it had established a TCP three way handshake, but started to drop packets
when trying to communicate over port 443.

I found online the log that contains information for the sign on process is 
located here: /var/log/vmware/vpxd/vpxd.log

I checked in the log and found that port 443 was already in use.

 2018-03-20T15:06:37.661Z [7F4321A15740 error 'vpxdvpxdMoReverseProxy'] [VpxdReverseProxy] Failed to create https proxy: Resource is already in use: <acceptor p:0x00007f4308117200, h:33, >

2018-03-20T15:06:37.661Z [7F4321A15740 error 'vpxdvpxdMain'] [Init] Init failed: ReverseProxyMo::Init()

I checked for open ports to work out what process was using port 443, and found it was using the process ID of 5911.

netstat -plnt | grep ':443'

tcp      129      0 0.0.0.0:443             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      5911/vpxdtcp                           4       0 :::443                  :::*                               LISTEN      5911/vpxd

I then searched for the PID to find the name of this process.

 ps -A | grep 5911

5911 ?        00:00:00 vpxd-worker

I stopped the parent process vmware-vpxd, which should stop the child process vpxd-worker but it didn’t.

service vmware-vpxd stop

I searched again for open ports, and even though the parent process vmware-vpxd had stopped, the port 443 was still in use.

The vpxd-worker process manages crash dumps. I killed off the process using the kill command.

kill -s KILL 5911

I then started the service, and it managed to successfully start.

service vmware-vpxd start