Increasing vAPI Heap Memory

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Fix and prevent issues that can lead to the VMware vAPI Endpoint service to crash

Symptoms:
The vAPI Endpoint service (vmware-vapi-endpoint) exhibits one or more of the following symptoms:

• Crashes
• Health changes to "Yellow" or "Red"
• Java dumps (*.hprof) files are written: /var/log/vmware/vapi/endpoint/java_pidXXXX.hprof
• The /var/log/vmware/vapi/endpoint/endpoint.log reports messages with "OutOfMemoryError" for example:

Caused by: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 6.7.x

Cause

The VMware vAPI Endpoint service (vmware-vapi-endpoint) has a default value of around 256 MB of heap memory, which can get exhausted by environments that heavily utilize the VMware vCenter Server API.

Resolution

Increase the amount of heap memory allocated to the vAPI Endpoint service.

1. Ensure the vCenter Server Appliance has been backed up before making any changes

2. Connect to your vCenter Server Appliance on the command line (SSH or console)

3. Check the current heap memory allocated to vAPI Endpoint (vmware-vapi-endpoint) with the following command:

cloudvm-ram-size -l | grep vmware-vapi-endpoint

4. If this value is at or close to a value of 256, double it to 512 with the following command:

cloudvm-ram-size -C 512 vmware-vapi-endpoint

5. Stop and start the vAPI Endpoint service for the change to take effect:

service-control --stop vmware-vapi-endpoint
service-control --start vmware-vapi-endpoint

Note - if the VMware vAPI Endpoint service heap memory has already been increased to 512 MB or greater, open a support request with VMware Technical Support for further review.

For most environments with vAPI Endpoint "OutOfMemory" errors, doubling the initial configuration provides enough heap memory to prevent recurrence of the issue.