Aria Suite Lifecycle upgrade fails or UI is inaccessible due to the root partition being full

Products

VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager upgrade fails.
- OR
UI is inaccessible.

Environment

VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.x

Cause

This issue occurs when the root partition on the Aria Suite Lifecycle appliance is full and does not have enough space to load the RPM packages.

df -h command displays similar result on /dev/sda4 partition:

Filesystem           Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs             2.9G   0 2.9G  0% /dev
tmpfs               3.0G  20K 3.0G  1% /dev/shm
tmpfs               3.0G 1.1M 3.0G  1% /run
tmpfs               3.0G   0 3.0G  0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda4             8.7G 7.0G 2.0G 85% /
tmpfs               3.0G  68K 3.0G  1% /tmp
/dev/sda2             119M  28M  85M 25% /boot
/dev/mapper/stroage_vg-storage 9.8G 156M 9.2G  2% /storage
/dev/mapper/data_vg-data     49G  21G 5.6G 39% /data
tmpfs               595M   0 595M  0% /run/user/0

Resolution

Firstly it is advisable to not add any files to the root partition. However in the event that the root partition is full without files manually added to reduce storage usage on the partition you can follow the below steps on the appliance.

Note: If the upgrade has failed, revert it to the snapshot and then perform the below cleanup steps.

Take a non-memory snapshot of VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle Appliance .
SSH to the appliance

Run the following command to identify files that are large:

find / -xdev -type f -size +50M -exec du -sh {} ';' | sort -rh | head -n50

Example of output in one instance can be:

1.8G  /var/lib/loginsight-agent/storage/liagent.db
303M  /var/log/nginx/access.log
244M  /opt/vmware/var/lib/vami/update/data/package-pool/package-pool/blackstone-8.12.0.7-21628952.noarch.rpm
233M  /opt/vmware/var/lib/vami/update/data/package-pool/package-pool/vlcm-files-8.12.0.7-21628952.noarch.rpm
221M  /opt/vmware/vlcm/postgresbackups/data-backup-2023-03-29-05:22:56.backup
186M  /opt/vmware/var/lib/vami/update/data/package-pool/package-pool/vlcm-8.12.0.7-21628952.noarch.rpm
173M  /var/lib/vrlcm/vmlcm-service-old-SNAPSHOT.jar_bkp
173M  /var/lib/vrlcm/vmlcm-service-8.10.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
157M  /var/log/sa
148M  /opt/vmware/var/lib/vami/update/data/package-pool/package-pool/VMware-commonjars-7.0.3.00000-9019451.x86_64.rpm
117M  /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone_bkp/spring-common/blackstone-external-8.10.0.jar
117M  /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone/spring-common/blackstone-external-8.10.0.jar

Note: You can see the liagent.db which is taking up ~ 1.8 GB.

Change directory to the following location :
```
cd /var/lib/loginsight-agent/storage
```
Check the status of the service. It should be active/running:
```
systemctl status liagentd.service  
```
Stop liagentd service:
```
systemctl stop liagentd.service
```
Remove the liagent.db file.
```
rm liagent.db
```
Start the liagent service:
```
systemctl start liagentd.service
```
Verify the space on / by running df -h . It should be more than 3 GB free space available .
Reboot the appliance:
```
reboot -f
```
Once Aria Suite Lifecycle is up and running, re-trigger the upgrade.

If you find that there is no /var/lib/loginsight-agent/storage/liagent.db when running the command find / -xdev -type f -size +50M -exec du -sh {} ';' | sort -rh | head -n50 but you have output similar to the below extract please follow subsequent steps:

406M    /opt/vmware/vlcm/postgresbackups/data-backup-2025-11-27-10:58:45.backup
190M    /var/lib/vrlcm/vmlcm-service-old-SNAPSHOT.jar_bkp
190M    /var/lib/vrlcm/vmlcm-service-8.18.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
137M    /usr/lib/jvm/OpenJDK-1.11.0/lib/modules
118M    /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone_bkp/spring-common/blackstone-external-8.18.0.jar
115M    /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone/spring-common/blackstone-external-8.18.0.jar
103M    /usr/bin/dockerd
92M     /usr/java/jre-vmware/lib/modules
71M     /usr/bin/docker-compose
58M     /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone_bkp/vco-cli/8.18.0/vco-cli-java-8.18.0.jar
58M     /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone_bkp/vco-cli/8.16.0/vco-cli-java-8.16.0.jar
58M     /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone/vco-cli/8.18.0/vco-cli-java-8.18.0.jar
58M     /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone/vco-cli/8.16.0/vco-cli-java-8.16.0.jar
56M     /usr/lib/jvm/OpenJDK-1.11.0/lib/src.zip
56M     /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone_bkp/vco-cli/8.8.0/vco-cli-java-8.8.0.jar
56M     /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone/vco-cli/8.8.0/vco-cli-java-8.8.0.jar
53M     /usr/bin/containerd

Take snapshot of VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle
Open ssh session to the VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle appliance as root
Move files with .backup extension to /data partition
```
mv /opt/vmware/vlcm/postgresbackups/*.backup /data
```
Any other backup files like /var/lib/vrlcm/vmlcm-service-old-SNAPSHOT.jar_bkp, /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone_bkp/spring-common/blackstone-external-8.18.0.jar, /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone_bkp/vco-cli/8.18.0/vco-cli-java-8.18.0.jar, /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone_bkp/vco-cli/8.16.0/vco-cli-java-8.16.0.jar and /opt/vmware/vlcm/blackstone_bkp/vco-cli/8.8.0/vco-cli-java-8.8.0.jar can be deleted using the rm command. Example:
```
rm /var/lib/vrlcm/vmlcm-service-old-SNAPSHOT.jar_bkp
```
Free up further space by deleting archived log files with .gz extension at /var/log/vrlcm location
1. Change directory to /var/log/vrlcm
```
cd /var/log/vrlcm
```
2. Remove archived log files
```
rm *.log.gz
```
Verify the space on / by running df -h . It should be more than 3 GB free space available .
Reboot the appliance:
```
reboot -f
```
Once Aria Suite Lifecycle is up and running, re-trigger the upgrade.

Additional Information

If you are still unable to reduce the amount of storage used on the root partition after applying all of the steps above and you do not have the option to extend the disk as per KB Extend root and alt_root volumes on VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle appliance for versions 8.12.x and later please contact Broadcom Support and note this Article ID (318504) in the problem description. For more information, see Creating and managing Broadcom support cases