How to increase the heap memory of vRealize Orchestrator in Cloud Extensibility proxy

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

• To increase the memory allocated to the vRealize Orchestrator server instance within the Cloud Extensibility proxy appliance. By default, the vRealize Orchestrator server is configured to use 3GB of memory.
• Issue observed in Cloud Extensibility proxy 8.6.2 and earlier versions.
• When the server is over-utilized and has to manage multiple workloads it crashes with the error, "OutOfMemoryErrors" in the vRealize Orchestrator console log directory: /services-logs/prelude/vco-app/console-logs/vco-server-app.log.
• The following exception is thrown in the logs:

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
Dumping heap to /usr/lib/vco/app-server/../app-server/logs/vco_2021-12-07_09:06_heap_dump.hprof ...
Heap dump file created [1697527497 bytes in 3.021 secs]
Terminating due to java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space

Environment

VMware Aria Automation 8.x.x

Resolution

• For Cloud Extensibility proxy version 8.7 or higher please refer to the "How to Scale the Heap Memory Size of the vRealize Orchestrator Server " article from the vRealize Orchestrator Product Documentation.
• The URL provided in this article is for vRO 8.11, please use the Product Documentation for the Orchestrator product version matching the Cloud Extensibility proxy version.

Workaround:

NOTE: Please take note of the overall memory utilization of the VA prior to extending the Heap memory. It is important that enough memory is left available for the rest of the services so the VA resources have to be scaled up first.

Example: If the desired heap memory is 7g then the VA RAM should be increased with 4G respectively because the subtraction between the default heap value of 3g the desired heap memory is 4G.

• Navigate to directory /data/upgrade/prelude/data/charts/vro
• Edit the file values.tpl by adding the following property "serverJvmHeapMax: {desired_heap_memory}" where {desired_heap_memory} has to be the value of the required heap memory.

 Example: serverJvmHeapMax: 6g

• Save the changes.
• Run command:

prelude-vami-upgrade --force

• Wait for the vco-app pod to be redeployed. You can monitor the status of the pod with the following command 

 kubectl -n prelude get pods -w

Important: Changes made in the file values.tpl are not persistent and they will be overwritten upon each next Cloud Release, therefore, the heap size value will be returned back to the default of 3g. It will be required to execute the above steps once again if the heap size has a value other than the default of 3g.