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vChr1s
Contributor
Contributor

vMA causes rapid database growth

Hey all.  Have a question and I wanted to see if anyone else is experiencing this.

I deployed vMA 4.1 a while back and I believe I followed the deployment guide correctly.  However, I had a problem where my vCenter came to a crashing halt.  I found that the SQL database had grown and filled the partition.  My db is usually around 240 MB and in a few weeks it grew to over 15 GB.  Through some digging I found that the vpx_event and vpx_event_arg tables grew tremendously due to an enormous amount of login and logout events.  After further digging I discovered that it was vMA logging in and out every couple of seconds.  I double checked to make sure all my credetials were correct but I could not find the reason behind the logins and logouts.  I cleaned up my db, removed my servers and shutdown vMA, and my database has remained at 240MB.

Now, I really want to get vMA back up and running but I wanted to see if anyone else has had this problem or might have any suggestions as to why this happened.

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Also, I wanted to add that I see a large amount of idle sessions when I look at the "Session" tab in the vCenter client.  I have seen upwards of 150 at one time.  I can only assume it is related.

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lamw
Community Manager
Community Manager

Did you add your vCenter server to vMA vi-fastpass? fpauth or adauth? Do you have vilogger enabled as well or your vCenter? I know for the vilogger capablities, it does have an option to collect logs from every 10secs to 3600secs but that is applicable only to ESX(i) host and not vCenter, unless you have enabled that?

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vChr1s
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Thanks for the reply.  No I didn't add the vCenter to vi-fastpass and it is using adauth.  And yes I have vilogger enabled for my four esxi hosts.

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lamw
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Can you run "vilogger list" to see what the current configured interval for the log collection for your ESXi host? When you dug into the VPX_EVENTS, you mentioned it was jut vMA logins, but that it doesn't specify what type of login? I'm wondering if it's logging the ESX(i) logins ... which would make more sense. When you said you removed vMA, did you mean you disabled all vMA functionality including adauth w/vCenter or was it just with vCenter piece and left the ESX(i) hosts alone

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vChr1s
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vilogger config is the following:

maxfilesize - 10

collectionperiod - 10

numrotation - 20

When I removed vMA I removed all functionality.  I removed all target servers and powered off vMA.

Unfortunately, this problem occurred about a month ago and I don't have any data about the type of login info.

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lamw
Community Manager
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Yea, it looks like you're just using the defaults which will have vMA connect in every 10seconds to collect logs. Since you know what your steady state of the DB size is, one thing you could try is slowly re-integrate vMA, perhaps start with the ESX(i) host since that's what I'm thinking is generating all the events, I don't _think_ vMA can even login using adauth, as it requires a user with AD credentials to login first. Try it with one ESX(i) host and just monitor the DB size for a few days, if it does login so frequently, you should see the VPX_EVENTS jump in size and that should help you identify the culprit. If you can't perform this on a production environment, try it in a dev lab OR if you have VMware SnS, I would recommend opening an SR with VMware Support to get more details

vChr1s
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks.  That's kinda what I decided to do.  I wanted to get vMA back up and running so I'm trying it with two esxi hosts added right now using fpauth and vilogger turned on.

I'll report back here afte a day or so with any more info.  Thanks for your help.

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