NSX Upgrade precheck showing as failure in NSX UI, error ESXi host has less than 180 MB in tmp partition

Products

• VMware NSX

Issue/Introduction

During the NSX upgrade, the host precheck stage of the upgrade gives you a warning indicating a ESXi host or multiple ESXi hosts have failed due to less than 180MB free space in tmp partition.

Error in the precheck 

"Check for sufficient free space on tmp partition of all ESXi hosts","This check will result in warning if free space in tmp partition on the node is less than 180MB.",FAILURE,"Error while checking free space on tmp partition on host. Please check the configuration state of host and ensure that services are operating normally."

Environment

VMware NSX

 

Cause

ESXi has less than 180MB on the tmp partition, which is not sufficient to allow NSX to be upgraded. 

Resolution

1. Check Free Space on /tmp

  df -h /tmp

Output will be similar to:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs            250M   90M  160M  36% /tmp

If Avail is less than 180MB, this check will fail.

 

2. Check for Large Files in /tmp by running following command:

du -sh /tmp/*

Output will be similar to:

4.0K    /tmp/.X11-unix
80M     /tmp/hostd.log
60M     /tmp/vpxa.log

3. From the list find the files taking up the space 

Run the following command to clear unnecessary files 

rm -rf /tmp/<Filename>

For example: 

rm -rf /tmp/hostd.log


Or to remove all the files in the directory use the following command

rm -rf /tmp/*

Note:That these steps will wipe out existing log files irretrievably. 

If you are not sure on what files can be cleared or require further assistance, please open up a support case with support to investigate further, mentioning this KB 413259.