Skyline Health - health finding - "Disk space finding for VMware vCenter Server Appliance", related to swap partition

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Skyline Health flags a health finding that is unhealthy -

Disk space finding for VMware vCenter Server Appliance

Category: Storage

Description: Decreased disk space for the VMware vCenter Server Appliance may lead to degraded performance or unresponsiveness. Performance issues may be observed with disk space usage over 70%. Click the Ask VMware link above for more details and a resolution

 

When reviewing the vCenter VAMI (https://vcenter-fqdn:5480) -

- under Monitor > Disks

- for Disk - "Hard disk 3"

- Partition - "swap"

- the Utilization is observed to be in excess of 70%

 

This 70% utilization exceeds a preset threshold and is generating the Skyline Health unhealth health finding that is seen.

 

Environment

vCenter 8.x

Cause

The swap partition is used to host the swap file (a virtual memory extension used by the vCenter VM when it runs out of physical (virtualised) memory) - thus it would be expected to fluctuate based on the vCenter VM activity.

In certain cases the swap partition free space may not be correctly reported on, or may not be being correctly freed up.

Resolution

Reboot the vCenter, the swap partition usage percentage is expected to drop significantly (and be below the 70% threshold for generating a Skyline Health unhealthy health finding)

Additional Information

Any concerns about vCenter RAM capacity can be addressed by increasing the RAM of the vCenter VM.