Smarts: ./brcontrol shows domain process with #0 PId number

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:


Under certain circumstances brcontrol will show process ids as zero:

[root@sam-server ~]$ brcontrol
Broker is located at: pc01:426      Started: Apr 19 12:14:23 2017
 
 
            Domain        Host Name   Port     PID   State Last Change Time
------------------ ---------------- ------ ------- ------- --------------------
  S inc-mi-o-401-sam   9400    2857 RUNNING Apr 19 12:14:45 2017
  S-APM-NMS inc-mi-o-406-apm   9440    2687 RUNNING Apr 19 12:19:06 2017
  S-APM1 inc-mi-o-406-apm   9441    2685 RUNNING Apr 19 12:19:06 2017
  S-BGP inc-mi-o-405-npm   9461    2183 RUNNING Apr 19 12:17:29 2017
  S-ESM1 inc-mi-o-404-esm   9433    2698 RUNNING Apr 19 12:17:06 2017
  S-MBIM inc-mi-o-401-sam   9403    2866 RUNNING Apr 19 12:14:34 2017
  S-MCAST inc-mi-o-403-vam   9450    2255 RUNNING Apr 19 12:16:01 2017
  S-OI inc-mi-o-402-trp   9430    3167 RUNNING Apr 19 12:15:31 2017

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - SMARTS

Cause

In terms of the impact on the application there is no functional impact on the application 

It is not a cause of a failure. It is an expected behavior on a broker restart. 
 
Expected behavior because:
Whenever a broker is restarted as a service, it restores from the rps file. RPS file contains information such as the last known status, port etc. But, It is important to note that the rps file does not contain information related to the process id of the servers which are registered to it.  The reason why it is so is to remove inconsistencies in the case when lets say a SAM/IP server restarts while the Broker is under restart as well.   Assume the broker is up and SAM server registers with PID 1111 and we restart broker and SAM server in parallel, if broker stores PID 1111 in rps  and reloads it from there on restart, it would be not matching to the new PID 2222 with which the SAM server came back with. In order to avoid such a confusion the PID is set to 0 on a restart. _

Resolution

As a workaround you can do the following:


1. using brcontrol's delete_dm <domain name> to remove the domain from broker.
2. using add_dm <domain name> <host> <port> <pid> to add the domain back to broker with correct pid.

There is no permanent solution as such, this is part of the products behaviour