After upgrading a vSphere 5.0 update 2 host to vSphere 5.1 update 1 we noticed an issue with the lsassd daemon. Right after update manager finished with the upgrade the lsassd starts to write a lot of messages. Within the last 5 minutes the syslog server received 170K log messages from the upgraded host alone.
See the screenshot below:
The following message keeps popping up in the logs:
esxihost.domain.loc lsassd[9297]: 0x6eb11b90:Terminating on fatal IPC exception
To work around this issue you need to leave the Windows domain. Select the host – Configuration – Authentication Services – Properties. Click on Leave Domain… The excessive logging hast stopped immediately.
After that you can rejoin to the Windows domain again.