Task and Event logs in vCenter

[bbambrick]

Hey,

Recently run into a problem where someone has configured a vCenter server to use a MS SQL express 2005 database, and the DB hit the 4GB size limit so vCenter wouldn't start. In order to make things start working again, I deleted some of the old tasks and events data from the VPX_EVENT, VPX_TASK, and VPX_EVENT_ARG tables. However, I'd prefer not to have to do this and waiting for a problem like that to happen again. I know you can set the retetnion time on statistics and perf logs, but can you do the same for event and task data? After removing the records I had over 3GB of space left free in the database.

Any advice much appreciated

[mehul96]

Hmmm, interesting. What is the size of your setup? i.e. number of hosts & VMs?

Also, what setting do you have for the 'logging options' ? Would lowering the verbosity help?

[bbambrick]

All the logging is set to default levels, but it's not the performance logs etc I'm interested in, those I want to keep. It's the tasks and events which are essentially useless to me after a couple of weeks that I want to prune out after a month or two. One of the deletes I ran deleted over 7 million records...

The setup is 20 servers in a cluster running about 100 VMs right now. A lot of the VMs (about 50%) are currently switched off though as we've just had a rollout on the system.

[jmcdonald1 · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately in the vCenter 2.5 line, there is no automatic pruning. In vCenter 4.0 (once it is released) there are task and event retention settings that you can keep events for x amount of time.

What kind of events seem to be filling up the tables?

Cheers,

/Jon

[bbambrick]

Hi Jon,

As for the events, I'm not sure, especially as to get vCenter to start again I had to remove those events I don't think it was anything out of the ordinary, just about 18 months worth of history. Good to know that you can set the retention level in vCenter 4. Thanks for your help