vCenter UI is slow in air-gapped environments

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• vCenter UI slows to a crawl after a few minutes of being logged in
• Thousands of requests to "vcsa.vmware.com" are seen in the browser console.
• The VCSA is in an air-gapped environment with no internet connectivity.
• Refreshing the page temporarily fixes the issue.

Environment

• VMware vCenter Server 7.0
• VMware vCenter Server 8.0

Cause

• This is caused by ESP Feedback requests from the UI being unable to reach VMware by Broadcom servers due to lack of internet connectivity.

Resolution

To resolve the issue, disable the ESP service on the vCenter using the following steps.

• SSH to VCSA where H5 client is running.
• Open H5 client's configuration file  webclient.properties with this command: vi /etc/vmware/vsphere-ui/webclient.properties
• Add or update the following property in webclient.properties file: esp.fs.disabled=true
• Save and close the file. Hit ESC key and type colon ':' and wq!
• Restart vsphere-ui service: service-control --restart vsphere-ui