How to restart vmtoolsd process in DLR/ESG in NSX for vSphere

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

• NSX for vSphere DLR and ESG run VMware Tools
• The ESG or DLR appliances may restart and generate an outage or a failover in the environment.
• In the Appliance logs you may see:

<DATE>T<TIME> MsgMgr[1175]: [edge-99]: [daemon.info] payload len:350 data:{"systemEvents":[{"message":"OOM happened, system rebooting in 3 seconds...","moduleName":"vShield Edge Appliance","timestamp":1601217960,"metaData":{"message":"27265 61188 176592 VseEventProcess 1175 4796 265360 msgmgr  862 3124 200016 syslog-ng 27285 2792 14408 vm-vmtoolsd 27272 2772 14144 sh "},"severity":"Critical","eventCode":30180}]}

Environment

NSX for vSphere

Cause

On older versions of NSX-v, a memory leak was present in VMware Tools running on the ESG / DLR Appliances which could cause the appliance to restart.

Resolution

This issue is resolved in NSX-V 6.4.6 and later.

An upgrade is advised if this issue is encountered.

Workaround:
As a workaround, the VMware Tools process can be pro-actively restarted to clear memory usage.

Procedure:
1) Access root shell of the appliance
2) Invoke the following two commands:
    # echo '0 0 1 * * /etc/rc.d/init.d/vm-vmtoolsd stop' >> /etc/fcrontab
  #/usr/local/bin/fcrontab /etc/fcrontab