We are running vcenter server 5.5.0 update 1a on a VM with 8x CPU and 24GB of memory. Last year we joined it with another vcenter server using linked mode. My colleague claims he started to notice performance issues in the web client around the time we joined the vcenter servers, but I believe it happened much more recently.
In the guest OS of the vcenter server task manager shows 95% memory usage while the performance graphs of the VM in the vsphere client show very low usage numbers. vROps corroborates these statistics, but performance is definitely suffering as the web client is very slow to respond and the fat client sometimes times-out when trying to connect to the vcenter server.
When installing vcenter server the medium JVM was selected which specifies 100-400 hosts (we have less than 60), and 1000-4000 VMs (we have less than 400).
SQL is installed on a separate VM so it is not a contributing factor to the performance issues. When sorting by memory usage in task manager multiple vpxd and java processes contribute to the majority of the memory consumption.
I opened a ticket with VMware last month regarding this and they found a service account that was hitting the vcenter server more than normal which was causing way too much logging. They pointed to this as being a probable reason for our memory consumption issues, told us to disable it, and closed the ticket. Whats up Gold was the service account, and we have since removed the vcenter server from that monitoring solution. Logging has reduced from what I can tell, but the memory issue persists.
Based on the size of our environment, and the provisioned memory on the VM, I find it hard to believe we are in need of still more memory. I understand in-guest resource information from task manager is not always accurate compared to host-based statistics from the vsphere client, but as I said performance is obviously suffering so something is not right.
I have been looking into upgrading the vcenter server to the latest version, 5.5u2e, but based on the release notes none of the updates between our two versions mention fixing a memory issue similar to ours. Update 2d does mention fixing VMware Directory Service excessively consuming memory, but vmdird.exe does not appear to be contributing to our memory issue.
Has anybody run into a similar issue, and know of a fix that has worked? My colleague thinks moving the web client service to its own VM will help, but based on the topology of vsphere 6 I think our best bet would be to break out the SSO service so that we can work towards an external PSC to allow the enhanced link mode feature once we move to vsphere 6. I don’t know that offloading SSO will help with memory, but I do know it is necessary for enhanced link mode, and based on VMware documentation an external PSC is recommended for large environments. While we do not technically fit that description I would prefer to have the capability to grow into that without having to re-deploy the vcenter server.
Thank you for reading, and for any input you can offer.
