vSphere appliance crashes and will no longer boot

[JulianMilano]

I have setup what I believe is a nested ESXi home lab using v5.5 ESXi hosts (VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.5.0.update01-1623387.x86_64.iso) and a v6.5 vCenter appliance (VMware-VCSA-all-6.5.0-8307201.iso). The reason for this is that I want to practice upgrading the hosts to v6.5 using Update Manager.

So, it's all setup and running, vCenter appliance is working OK, then after a few hours, it crashes with the following message fills the terminal screen "Write-error on swap-device".

I then try to reboot the appliance and get this:

I have re-installed the vCenter server twice now and that seems the only way to fix the issue, but it's getting tiring fixing it this way. I can only connect to my lab via the ESXi host.

What can I do to fix this issue? Note that I have been using VMware for the last few years at work, but my Linux skills are limited and most of the management I do is via the GUI so pls be very descriptive when directing me to run Linux commands.

My BRIX has ESXi v6.5 installed. I then created 3x ESXi 5.5 virtual hosts and the vCenter 6.5 appliance was installed from my Windows PC. ESXi is installed on a 32gB USB stick plugged into the BRIX.

Hardware:

Gigabyte Brix GB-BRi5H-8250, 32GB RAM, WD 240GB SSD (WDS240G2G0A-00JH30).

[daphnissov]

As I warned you in this post, that hardware doesn't have nearly enough capability to run 3 nested hosts with any VMs on top of them. The error you're seeing is likely due to resource contention/exhaustion and is not normally seen on aptly-capable hardware. There's really not much to be said or done other than you getting more or different hardware that is appropriate to the environment you wish to run.