No items in datacenter

[Mokrasch]

We have a problem with our new vCenter Operations Manager installation. The UI VM is successfully connected to the vCenter but below the Data Center no systems are show (see picture). There is no cluster, ESXi, or VM.

Our vCenter is a virtual appliance with version 5.1.

vCenter Operations Manager has the Version 5.7.2

Does anyone have any idea why no data is displayed except the data center.

[gradinka]

seems like your permissions are not set correctly, and most likely does not propagate below the Hamburg cluster.

check how it's all configured in vSphere client for the users being used by vcops

also, why not use 5.8.1 instead of 5.7.2...

[Mokrasch]

In vCenter the user can access all objects. So it should be no problem with the permissions.

We assume that we are affected by this issue:

VMware KB: Collections against one or more vCenter Server data centers fail

But unfortunately we can not continue with this procedure. Can someone explain what needs to be done there.

We choose 5.7.2 because our vCenter is 5.1 and in the download instrcution we read this:

Can we use 5.8?

Thanks for the reply.

[swalker_LST]

Over the last couple of days we have also started to experience the same issue. I deployed 5.6 a year or so ago, then upgraded through 5.7 and later 5.8.1 without any issues. We haven't changed any configuration settings since then for either the collector user or the vCOPs license, however recently (..and it may be unconnected) we decommissioned several datastores and added some new ones. Since around that time we started seeing a problem where some datacentres cannot be drilled down into, whereas others can. Our vCenter permissions are applied right at the top of the hierarchy (on the VC object itself) and the propagate option applies exactly the same set of permissions to each of the datacentre objects. Some standalone hosts in the root of the hierarchy can be seen, whereas others cannot.

We have approximately 80% of the inventory items missing now. I unregistered and reregistered the vCOPs solution with vCenter which was successful, but didn't fix the problem. Further to this I restored a backup of the original appliance that was around a month old, and this also has the same issue. There would appear to be some vCenter inventory related issue going on which might have occurred when we added new resources recently, however all of the vCenter health checks work out fine so I'm at a loss as to what has caused it.

Finally, in order to prove whether the issue is VC related I've just deployed an entirely fresh set of vCOPS UI and Analytics VMs - then registered/licensed correctly and confirm exactly the same behaviour is being experienced.

Does anyone have any ideas about where to look next?

[gradinka]

Have you checked on customUi?

any chance your host have been (or still are ) maintenance mode?

[mark_j]

Further, one item I'd note is that in the 'screenshot' in the OP, the Datacenter "Hamburg" hierarchy is collapsed on the left. What would happen if you expand it? I'm wonder if this is simply a user interface behavior..

Further, I'd like to know if you click on the "Hamburg" Datacenter, what the panes on the right show? Does Health and workload populate with stats? When you go to Planning/Views, do you see VM capacity/etc?

[swalker_LST]

I'm not very familiar with CustomUI - but since I've redeployed the appliances from clean the only thing that remains in common is the vCenter DB. None of the hosts are marked as maintenance mode in the vSphere Web Client/Client and if I go into CustomUI and choose, Environment>Environment Overview I can see all of the objects within the Inventory (all marked with a 100 health score). All have got a green mark against the Collection column, and the Data receiving icon. When I tried this earlier today using the original appliance almost all of the items were marked with a blue question mark. I would be tempted to leave it and see what happens next, but we have already started receiving data for a smaller subordinate datacentre and nothing at all for any datacentre with a cluster or larger configuration present.

Update: Actually, it's a very long list of items in the CustomUI view - and all of the entries which are not showing up in the vCOPs are marked with a blue question mark.

Message was edited by: swalker_LST

[mark_j]

So, you've now got two appliances deployed monitoring the same infrastructure?

Have you restarted the original appliance?

If the resource have a green collecting indicator, it's not in maintenance mode in vC Ops.

When you say "nothing at all for any datacentre with a cluster or larger configuration present.", which vC Ops deployment are you referring to? Is this a common problem across both vC Ops deployments? When you say "nothing at all", are you saying that no resources are getting created for them, or are they getting created and marked blue/unknown?

[swalker_LST]

Hi again, I removed the original appliances (vApp) by disassociating them from vCentre and removing the asset from the Solutions tab. This was completed successfully before deploying a new vCOPs vApp, and this was again registered with vCentre. So there were never two sets of vCOPs running at the same time.

When I'm referring to a lack of data within vCOPs for a certain datacentre (i.e. nothing at all) what I meant was that when I try to expand the DC name using the drill down option on the left pane I am able to expand it as far as displaying individual cluster names, but no health information is being received from any objects within it. All of the folders within the datacentre are detected, but displayed only as grey squares on the health map.

This was multi-datacentre hierarchy was working fine like this for at least 18 months, and the missing information is consistent with what I couldn't view on the original appliance and the one which I've just deployed in place of it. The following screen capture shows the hierarchy expanded to its full extent, but I can definitely confirm that the permissions are identical for each datacentre.

The only other slightly new thing that we've done recently is set up VM Storage Profiles for use with Storage DRS.

[swalker_LST]

Hey All,

I am happy to update my own part of this discussion in the hope that it might help someone else in the same situation. Basically we were suffering Inventory differences between the vSphere client (C#) and the Web Client, and this now explains why it was not possible for vCOPs to reliably pull information out of vCenter for all of the datacenter nodes/hierarchy as detailed above.

However, since the Inventory service was running and everything else seemed OK we believed that this was a vCOPs problem. Almost by chance, we attempted to restart the vCenter Server and found that the Inventory Service would no longer start up afterwards. This led us to investigate why 40GB of hard disk space on the vCenter Server had been eaten up by Inventory Service DB XHIVE transaction logs. We recreated the Inventory Service DB using the documented procedure, but this did not resolve the problem. We could see more than 10MB of data being written to the Inventory logs per second, and high CPU utilisation. Further investigation of the debug logs for the Inventory Service led us to discover a known problem with the use of the vFlash feature on (only a single server) one of vCenter member hosts was causing the problem. We removed it from vCenter, applied the patch as detailed in the link below, and the problem with vCOPs is now resolved.

I hope this description makes someone else's day a little bit easier!!..

VMware KB: VMware vCenter Server consumes most of the CPU, memory, or disk I/O after enabling Virtua...