Hi folks,
It’s been a long time since my last post.
Here I come with a new issue in vCloud Director Service Provider (8.10 but I think it’s applicable to more recent and previous versions).
Our platform consists of vCenter 6.0U2 (external PSC , tiny model), NSX 6.2.5 and vCloud Director SP 8.10.1.
A few days ago I faced a weird issue while I was trying to import a vApp template in my organization catalog :
“[xxxxx] Folder xxxx does not exist in our inventory, but vCenter Server claims that is does.”
Meanwhile, I was able to upload media files in the same catalog.
I observed the same results after running the same tests on all our catalogs and organization.
How the problem has been solved ?
I first thought it was due to a vCloud inventory issue. I forced a synchronization with vCenter without any improvement. I even cleared the INV tables in the vCloud database. Same result, still unable to upload vApp or OVF in the catalogs.
VMware support pointed out the issue without even requiring the support bundles.
This was actually a vCenter issue and not a vCloud one. Our vCenter was suffering of low memory.
vCenter did what vCloud asked but took too much time to inform to update the cell. This is the explanation given by VMware. A simple reboot should solve the issue.
To confirm the RAM problem, i simply ran the command “free -m” on our vCenter appliance, the output showed that the swap partition was heavily used, almost entirely, more than 20 GB. I do not mention the RAM on purpose because it almost always consumes around 8 GB.
In this case, swapping very likely means that the vCenter has memory leaks…
A simple reboot could have freed the memory and flushed the swap partition. I think so, however I decided to add some more RAM and adjust the VM to the small model. This, because our platform also backs vRA and a lot of other components that interact with vCenter.
After the reboot my upload issue was solved !
Good to know !
RAM Upgrade
Notice that as of the version 6 of vcsa, it is no more required to manually adjust the RAM dedicated to the JVM. The JVM memory is dynamically adjusted.
The famous William Lam (blog VirtuallyGhettto) talks about that in this post.
Disk sizing upgrade
Moreover, no need to manually resize all the file systems. A script checks the disks and volumes and resizes them automatically at the boot of the appliance. If the resizing occurs while the appliance is already running a simple command line does the job. W. Lam explains that too here.
If you want to get more information about the VCSA partitioning you can check this KB.
Here, a reminder for the different VCSA sizing models.