Skip to main content

RAM Disk full on ESXi host



Sometime we used to get issue where were are not able to perform vMotion or logging was unable to write under /var/log.. While trying to do some normal things – like vMotion. I noticed an error which states just “A general system error occurred.”  On further investigation, I found that the underlying message was an out of disk space message while trying to proceed with a Storage vMotion.

Observations during issue

While vMotion – “A general system error occurred:”
While performing Storage vMotion – “/var/log/vmware/journal/xxxx error writing file. There is no space left on the device.”

Steps during troubleshooting

  • Go to Configuration tab on host in vCenter client, go to Security Profile, click Properties link on the Services section.
  • Scroll down to SSH and highlight – click options – click start to start SSH service.
  • Use putty or reflections to ssh to the host.
  • If you get a connection rejected – root filesystem ramdisk is probably full.
  • Go to console (either through KVM or OA for blades)
  • F2 to login, login, arrow down to Troubleshooting Options, select Enable ESXi Shell.
  • Press ALT-F1 to change to management shell and login (same root credentials).
  • Run ‘vdf -h’ and look for root filesystem – should look like:
    Ramdisk                   Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
    root                       32M        3M       28M  10% --
  • If it is 0M available and 100% used, that’s the problem.  Try to clear up space:
    cd /var/log/
     ls -la
  • Check size of the hpHelper.log file – likely pretty large.  Reset the file, if large.
    > hpHelper.log
After clearing the hpHelper.log, were were able to bring the host into normal state and all task were observed as normal. Identified issue detected with the HP agents inside the custom image of ESXi provided by HP  It seems in some circumstances that the hpHelper.log file can become very large, filling the RAMdisk and causing the issues.  Its a first for me and I have not observed the issues on any of my other ESXi hosts running on Proliant rack-mount or blade servers.  
Happy Sharing... :)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Changing the FQDN of the vCenter appliance (VCSA)

This article states how to change the system name or the FQDN of the vCenter appliance 6.x You may not find any way to change the FQDN from the vCenter GUI either from VAMI page of from webclient as the option to change the hostname always be greyed out. Now the option left is from the command line of VCSA appliance. Below steps will make it possible to change the FQDN of the VCSA from the command line. Access the VCSA from console or from Putty session. Login with root permission Use above command in the command prompt of VCSA : /opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_config_net Opt for option 3 (Hostname) Change the hostname to new name Reboot the VCSA appliance.   After reboot you will be successfully manage to change the FQDN of the VCSA . Note: Above step is unsupported by VMware and may impact your SSL certificate and face problem while logging to vSphere Web Client. If you are using self-signed certificate, you can regenerate the certificate with the

Issue : Configure Management Network option is Grayed out into ESXi

Last week I got into an issue of one of my client into Vsphere environment where one of its ESXi went done out of the network. Issue was IP address was showing 0.0.0.0 on main Esxi screen and when I tried to change the network configuration, its " Configure Management network option was greyed out.  I tried to gid into it and try to analyis its vmKernal and vmwarning logs. What I found is its VMkernal switch got removed due to unexpected reason. So to resolve the issue I tried to reconfigure its vswitch0 (vmk0) by going into Tech Mode of that Exi. Below are the steps which I followed to resolve the issue. 1) Login to ESXi 2) Press F2, Check if you " Configure Management network " is greyed out or not" if yes,    follow below 3) Press ALT+F1 to move the ESXi screen to tech mode   ( This is command line like dos) 4) login with root account 5) Run the following command into it esxcli network ip interface add --interface-name= vmk0

Collecting Logs from NSX-T Edge nodes using CLI

  This article explains how to extract the logs from NSX-T Edge nodes from CLI. Let's view the steps involved: 1) Login to NSX-T  Edge node using CLI from admin credentials. 2) Use of  " get support-bundle " for Log extraction. get support-bundle command will extract the complete logs from NSX-T manager/Edge nodes. nsx-manager-1> get support-bundle file support-bundle.tgz 3) Last step is to us e of " copy file support-bundle.tgz url " command. copy file will forward your collected logs from the NSX-T manager to the destination(URL) host from where you can download the logs. copy file support.bundle.tgz url scp://root@192.168.11.15/tmp Here, the URL specified is the ESXi host ( 192.168.11.15) under /tmp partition where logs will be copied and from there one can extract it for further log review. Happy Learning.  :)