Short tip: Full vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 database prohibits logins
Recently one of my vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) 5.5 installations was unable to proceed logins anymore. After having a look at the storage consumption I saw that two partitions were filled up:
1# df -h /storage/{core,db}
2Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
3/dev/sdb1 20G 20G 0 100% /storage/core
4/dev/sdb3 60G 56G 90M 100% /storage/db
In the VMware knowledge base there is an article regarding this symptom. This is a known issue in vCenter Server 5.5U2. The vPostgres database creates plenty of log entries like that:
1WARNING: there is already a transaction in progress
The workaround is to decrease the log level. To do so, it is required to stop vCenter and the database and alter the vPostgres configuration file. Afterwards it is recommended to delete all log files except the most recent one:
1# service vmware-vpxd stop
2# service vmware-vpostgres stop
3# cd /storage/db/vpostgres
4# cp postgresql.conf postgresql.conf.orig
5# vi postgresql.conf
6...
7312gg
8...
9#log_min_messages = warning
10log_min_messages = error
11
12ESC ZZ
13
14# find . -type f -ctime +1 -exec rm {}
One directory was cleaned - in my case there were also plenty old coredumps in the /storage/core directory. They can be removed without hesitation:
1# cd /storage/core
2# ls -lhs
3...
42.1G -rw------- 1 root root 2.6G Aug 18 08:46 core.vpxd-worker.25327
59.6G -rw------- 1 root root 12G Aug 18 06:39 core.vpxd-worker.4489
6# rm core.vpxd-worker.*
After starting the database and vCenter, logins should be possible again:
1# service vmware-vpostgres start
2# service vmware-vpxd start