NSX Manager Memory Usage Very High or NSX Manager Memory Usage High alarm triggers on small or medium sized Managers with NSX 4.x

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

• NSX Manager is either small or medium sized.
• The following alarm is frequently triggering and getting resolved automatically

         

• NSX Manager logs shows the following.
  
  var/log/syslog.log
[Timestamp]  NSX 76048 MONITORING [nsx@6876 alarmId="UUID" alarmState="OPEN" comp="nsx-manager" entId="UUID" eventFeatureName="manager_health" eventSev="MEDIUM" eventState="On" eventType="manager_memory_usage_high" level="WARNING" nodeId="UUID" subcomp="monitoring"] The memory usage on Manager node UUID has reached 93% which is at or above the high threshold value of 90%.
  
  
• Top output on Managers shows memory usage is high but stable.
  
  

  Thu Jun 05 17:31:03 UTC 2025
top - 17:31:03 up 8 days, 15:26,  0 users,  load average: 4.04, 3.38, 3.08
Tasks: 292 total,   1 running, 291 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 12.3 us, 17.4 sy,  0.0 ni, 63.8 id,  4.3 wa,  0.0 hi,  2.2 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem : 24579964 total,   261160 free, 22566092 used,  1752712 buff/cache
KiB Swap:        0 total,        0 free,        0 used.  1597108 avail Mem

      PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+    TGID COMMAND
  76874 uproton   20   0 9333724   5.0g  26488 S  10.0  20.9   1581:27   76874 /usr/lib/jvm/openjdk-java11-runtime-amd64/bin/java -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/opt/vmware/prot+
  74142 nsx       10 -10 7937336   3.0g  28288 S   5.0  12.9 440:51.99   74142 /usr/lib/jvm/openjdk-java11-runtime-amd64/bin/java -Dlogging.subcomp=ccp -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemory+
  75981 nsx-sea+  20   0 5978228   1.7g  18808 S   0.0   7.4 369:20.20   75981 /usr/lib/jvm/openjdk-java11-runtime-amd64/bin/java -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xlog:gc*:/var/log/sear+

Environment

VMware NSX 4.x

Cause

Across multiple releases there has been an increase in baseline memory usage. The introduction of new features and JRE upgrades has reduced the available memory in the UA resulting in high memory alarms on small and medium Managers.  

Resolution

This issue is resolved in VMware NSX 4.2.2, available at Broadcom downloads.

If you are having difficulty finding and downloading software, please review the Download Broadcom products and software KB.

Workaround:

• Increase the NSX Manager form factor to Large (Resize NSX managers)