ESXi 5.1 Host out of sync with VDS

A recent issue I was having was that our ESXi 5.1 hosts would go “out of sync” with the VDS.  The only fix that would work was rebooting the host.  After digging into the log file, I discovered that the host was failing to get state information from the VDS. The entries are below:

value = “Failed to get DVS state from vmkernel Status (bad0014)= Out of memory”,
             }
          ],
          message = “Operation failed, diagnostics report: Failed to get DVS state from vmkernel Status (bad0014)= Out of memory”

The issue is a bug in the version of 5.1 we were running (Update 2 at the time) and is a memory leak on the host when using E1000 NICs in your VMs.  Because these VMs were created a long time ago, they were defaulted to the E1000.  The fix for this issue is updating to the latest build of ESXi which has a fix for the issue.  And also, don’t use E1000 NICs, always go with VMXNET3.  Problem solved!