Understanding Worker Node increasing in VCF Management Services Platform

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

This article clarifies the behavior regarding unexpected increases and decreases of worker nodes within the VCF Management Services Platform. Customers may observe the number of active worker nodes fluctuating, which can raise concerns about potential underlying issues or instability within their environment.

Environment

VCF 9.1

Cause

The observed behavior is standard operation for the VCF Management Services. The platform utilizes a cluster autoscaler component that dynamically adjusts the number of worker nodes to match current resource requirements.
The number of worker nodes fluctuates, particularly due to the addition of new components(such as log management) or scaling those.

Resolution

No corrective action is required, as this is expected platform behavior.

If concerns arise regarding worker node fluctuations, administrators can verify that the autoscaler is functioning normally by reviewing the logs for the cluster autoscaler component: /vmsp-platform/[masked]/cluster-autoscaler-clusterapi-cluster-autoscaler-[masked]/clusterapi-cluster-autoscaler/console-log-[timestamp].log