High VMFS heap memory consumption might cause virtual machines to become unresponsive

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

• In environments with many large datastores and many VMs on thin-provisioned disks.
• VMFS resource allocation might consume a high amount of heap memory, proportional to the size of the datastores.
• As a result, VMFS heap memory might be exhausted.
• It lead to VMs becoming unresponsive Or vSphere vMotion tasks failing with errors for VM invalid state.

--vmkernel.log--
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS cpu48:7481319)WARNING: Heap: 4105: Heap_Align(vmfs3, 1048576/1048576 bytes, 8 align) failed.  caller: 0x42003133c02c
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS cpu88:2496333)Admission failure in path: host/user/vm.2496326:vmmanon.2496326
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS cpu88:2496333)vmmanon.####### (#######) extraMin/extraFromParent: 476/476, vm.####### (#######) childEmin/eMinLimit: 42902/43008
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS cpu158:2102095)FS3J: 3235: Cancelling txn (0x43160f323400) callerID: 0xc1d0000f due to failurepre-committing: Out of memory
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS cpu158:2102095)Fil6: 4092: 'Datastore01': Fil6 file IO (<FD c16 r50>) : Out of memory
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS cpu158:2102095)Fil6: 4058: ioCtx: 0x45ebf26fc380, world: 2102095, overallStatus: Out of memory, token: 0x0, tokenStatus: N, txnToken: 0x0, txnTokenStatus: N, totalIOSize: 4096, maxIOLength: 4608

Environment

VMware ESXi 8.0

Resolution

This issue is resolved in the VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 3e (Build 24674464)

Additional Information

VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 3e Release Notes
https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vsphere/vsphere/8-0/release-notes/esxi-update-and-patch-release-notes/vsphere-esxi-80u3e-release-notes.html