vCenter Server UI Performance Degradation Due to Historical Task Event

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• vCenter Server experiences severe performance degradation, high CPU utilization and sluggishness within the vSphere Client interface.
• High resource utilization and system stress are observed when running performance monitoring tools such as vimtop.
• While restarting the vsphere-ui or executing a full vCenter service restart temporarily restores responsiveness, performance degradation recurs shortly after

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 7.x 
VMware vCenter Server 8.x

Cause

Excessive accumulation of historical tasks, events and performance statistics within the vCenter PostgreSQL Database has caused system resource exhaustion and UI responsiveness issues.

Resolution

Perform the following steps to clean the database. 

1. Take a snapshot of the vCenter Server VM before performing any of these actions.
2. Stop all vCenter Server services: service-control --stop --all
3. Start the vPostgres service: service-control --start vmware-vpostgres
4. Connect to the vCenter database: /opt/vmware/vpostgres/current/bin/psql -U postgres -d VCDB
5. Delete old tasks, events, and statistics data (refer to KB 2110031 for the complete SQL cleanup script): 
   /opt/vmware/vpostgres/current/bin/psql -U postgres -v TaskMaxAgeInDays=7 -v EventMaxAgeInDays=7 -v StatMaxAgeInDays=7 -d VCDB -t -q -f /tmp/2110031_Postgres_task_event_stat_reset_event_sequence.sql
6. Rebuild all tables and indexes: vacuum full;
7. Update statistics for the query planner: vacuum analyze;
8. Exit the database prompt: \q
9. Start all vCenter Server services: service-control --start --all