VCSA crashes

[vasileiosg]

Hello,

I have set up a test environment in my house with ESXi and VCSA. I don't have much memory (4GB for the VCSA) and i don't need most of the advantages that VCSA provides but i like and i am testing the functionality especially of the new HTML5 environment. However, after few days, both environments stop working. The issue goes away with a good old restart. I am assuming 4GB is not enough for the appliance, but is there a way i can disable features that i am using so the memory can be enough?

Thanks!

[SureshKumarMuth]

VCSA requires min 8GB memory, however it will not use complete 8GB always. How you identified that the VCSA crashes due to memory issue.

Is VCSA uses more than 4GB memory ? Memory usage increases based on the tasks which runs by vpxd. If you give more load then vc will look for more memory. Also, let me know if VCSA crashes means the service crashes or whole appliance goes to unresponsive state.

Have you tried logging into console and check the memory utilization using top command to check if it is due to low memory ?

[vasileiosg]

Hi!

thank you so much for your reply! When it crashes, I cannot access either web interfaces. I can on the other hand connect to it using Fusion but of course it is very limited interface to do much and since i cannot use the windows client any longer, i end up restarting it. SSH also works fine.

To be honest, it is an assumption that it is a memory issue. I see that during the day the memory consumption goes close to 90% so i assumed that was the issue.

Is there any way i could check it out?

[SureshKumarMuth]

webclient/think client is not working --> this is due to vcenter server is not responding.

Two things to isolate,

We have to find if complete appliance (SUSE Linux) is hanging or only the vcenter appliance.

Since you say ssh is working, then you can run top command at the time of issue and check the memory utilization and swapping. If you see more swapping , then it confirms there is memory starvation.

Also try to restart vcenter services to check if that helps. Also check vpxd log if there are any specific errors related to sql or something else.

As per your comments it looks like memory contention, however I am curious to see if there is anything other thing which causes this keeping memory contention as the last resort.

[vasileiosg]

Hi Sureshkumar,

needless to say that all this time since my post, it hasn't happened. On the other hand, before posting it was happening constantly. Murphy's law i guess....

[SureshKumarMuth]

Nice to hear   vCenter doesn't want burden in the name of troubleshooting so it stopped playing ...;)

[Datten]

Hi.

Had same issue, when You have an access through the SSH. As colegue above said, check all services - its possible that the web client is down. Restart it manaully, give him some time to stand up and then check.

[vasan22in · Accepted solution]

Hello,

If SSH is working and web interface is not working, you need to look into the web-client service status in vCenter server. SSH your vcenter and run the below cmd,

Run this command to list the vCenter Server Appliance services:

service-control --list

Check "vsphere-client" status. I its stopped,you need to start it.

Run this command to start a specific service:

service-control --start <servicename>

Refer the below link for vCenter service details:

Stopping, starting, or restarting VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.x services (2109887) | VMware KB 

[vasileiosg]

Thank you so much for that! I didn't know it! Before I started this post, it was crashing constantly. Now it has been so long time and it hasn't crashed at all.... What can I say!

Thank you all!