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vCenter UI becomes unresponsive

Hi All,

On a newly installed vSAN 6.7 cluster, i'm experiencing intermittent response from the vCenter UI. It would return after ~30-45 seconds, during the UI being unavailable pings are still responsive, ruling out network connectivity. Both vCenter and hosts sit in the same subnet so they do not traverse the firewall for intercommunication.

It's a 3 node Hybrid cluster with the only existing VM deployed being vCenter. Things i've tried are:-

1. Rebooting the vCenter appliance.

2. Running thorough diagnostics at the vendor (Dell R830s) hardware layer on all components, all nodes passed successfully.

3. Migrate the Appliance off to different host servers within the cluster.

4. Have two hosts up at any one time, while shutting off the third (eliminate memory/disk issues). All produced the same issue, regardless of which node was hosting the VM.

Functionality wise, it works however, it is intermittent as described above. Anyone has any ideas/suggestions on this one?

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ashwin_prakash
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hello,

We see that you have configured vSAN environment with 3 ESXI host and trying to perform fail over and test the configuration which you have created on vSAN.

  • Make sure that a minimum of three hosts contribute storage to the vSAN datastore.
  • For maintenance and remediation operations on failure, add at least four hosts to the cluster.
  • Designate hosts that have uniform configuration for best storage balance in the cluster.
  • Do not add hosts that have only compute resources to the cluster to avoid unbalanced distribution of storage components on the hosts that contribute storage. Virtual machines that require much storage space and run on compute-only hosts might store a great number of components on individual capacity hosts. As a result, the storage performance in the cluster might be lower.
  • Do not configure aggressive CPU power management policies on the hosts for saving power. Certain applications that are sensitive to CPU speed latency might have low performance. For information about CPU power management policies, see the vSphere Resource Management documentation.
  • Consider the configuration of the workloads that you place on a hybrid or all-flash disk configuration.

Below is the link which would help you with more details of vSAN requirement.

Hardware Requirements for vSAN

Sincerely,
Ashwin Prakash
Skyline Support Moderator
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Knowledgable
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi Ashwin,

This issue is not failover testing. The vCenter web ui hangs after a few minutes.

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ashwin_prakash
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

How many hosts are active when the vCenter web UI hangs.

Sincerely,
Ashwin Prakash
Skyline Support Moderator
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Knowledgable
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

All hosts are active. The only vm installed is the vcenter appliance.

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msripada
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Can you explain in brief what exactly happens when you click on object or what do you refer as hung. Are you seeing any error messages?

Can you share the screenshots? Please check the vsphere_client_virgo.log on the vCenter server.for VCSA, it is in var/log/vmware/vsphere-client/logs location

Thanks,

MS

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Knowledgable
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Enthusiast

At random intervals, the UI would become unresponsive and selecting any of the options just sits with the icon spinning. After 30-45 seconds, i am able to use the interface again. During this time there are no errors presented. I am able to ping the server continuously during this period when the web ui is not working.

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msripada
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Looks like the web gui is waiting on some providers to gather information. Generally, the timeout period for any provider would be 120 seconds if the web gui does not get the info from respective provider, it times out error with provider name.

What is the vCenter memory assigned and inventory size ?

Thanks,

MS

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Knowledgable
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thank you for clearing that up. The install was set to 'tiny' for the appliance during the deployment. At present, it shows memory assigned to the appliance at 10GB. All default options from the vsan installer.

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ashwin_prakash
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Have you tried to access vCenter from a different machine, Also check if its the same issue while using both webclient and HTML.

Check if there are any error on wrapper.log

Sincerely,
Ashwin Prakash
Skyline Support Moderator
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msripada
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

in 6.0 we had wrapper .. and wrappers are only used for startup of service but not once service is started. in 6.5 and 6.7, i think wrapper is not engaged as vmon comes into place.

Thanks,

MS

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Knowledgable
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Enthusiast

I have tried alternate machines and both web client and html5 produce the same results.

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RatBoyGL
Contributor
Contributor

We just recently upgraded to vCenter 6.7 and I have the same issue.

We also have a totally separate vCenter on 6.5 and it does NOT have the same issue.

So I know it is not the browser or my lap top.

The one with the lag is currently running the Linux Appliance with 4 CPU's and 12 GB of RAM.   I see now peak usage for the appliance when it does it.

Description of the symptoms:  Basically, it will be displaying whatever the last object I clicked on.   Then, when I click another object, sometimes the screen blanks out and I get a spinning circle.  However, most of the time, literally nothing happens. 

In the below screen shot, you can see I clicked on a different VM other than our appliance, but the pane on the right has stayed on the appliance.  And will for 30-45 seconds. 

Also, during this "frozen" time, if I right click on a VM, the menu does not come up.

Also, eventually everything I click catches up.  So it does seem to be caching my actions and eventually doing them.

pastedImage_0.png

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