/storage/log becomes 100% full when exporting the vCenter Appliance log bundles

Products

• VMware vCenter Server 6.0
• VMware vCenter Server 7.0
• VMware vCenter Server 8.0

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• The "/storage/log" partition becomes 100% full while trying to generate a vCenter Appliance log bundle

Filesystem             Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/log_vg-log 9.9G 4.1G 5.3G  44%  /storage/log

• The size of the vCenter Server log bundle is relatively large, even when there are no hosts registered. For example, the generated log bundle was more than 5GB.

     Few VCenter management activities might be halted (For eg. Storage vMotion / Compute vMotion ) 

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 6.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 7.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 8.0.x

Resolution

To resolve this issue:

1. Connect to the vCenter Server Appliance using SSH and log in as the root user. Enable shell by typing:  shell
2. Navigate to the root directory

cd /;

3. Search for any old log bundles:  

find . -iname *.tgz;

4. Navigate to the relevant directory and delete the old log bundles: 

rm *.tgz;

5. Restart all vCenter Server services

service-control --stop --all;service-control --start --all;

Note: Should these steps not be applicable to your specific scenario and no old log bundles can be found, please see vCenter Server Appliance disk space is full for additional issues related to insufficient disk space. 

Additional Information

Troubleshooting vCenter Appliance /storage/log directory is 80% or more full