vSAN EPD service is not staying running

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

vSAN cluster has an issue where hosts are unable to run the EPD service.

Able to start it manually but it stops within a few minutes.

There is scratch space available on both hosts and the EPD.db file is present on hosts.

All other cluster services (cmmdsd, osfds, cmmdsTimeMachine etc.) are running as expected on the hosts.

Environment

VMware vSAN 7.0

Cause

EPD service will fail to stay running after manually starting the service.

In /var/run/log/epd.log the following errors can be seen.

2025-03-31T16:13:01.230Z 5409318 warning epd EntryDB_EnableCksumExtension: Failed to run VACUUM : database disk image is malformed (11) failedAt:1918
2025-03-31T16:13:01.230Z 5409318 warning epd EntryDB_Open: Failed to enable libcksumvfs db '/scratch/epd-storeV2.db': database disk image is malformed (195887105)
2025-03-31T16:13:01.353Z 5409318 warning epd EPDStoreOpen: Failed to open db (/scratch/epd-storeV2.db): Failure

Resolution

To resolve this issue use the following steps from EPD Service not starting on ESXi

Copy the current database file to a new one and delete the old one. Then restart the epd service.

(1) Stop epd service
/etc/init.d/epd stop

(2) Verify epd is stopped
 /etc/init.d/epd status

(3) Copy existing epd database
cp /scratch/epd-storeV2.db /scratch/epd-storeV2-copy.db

(4) Delete existing epd database
rm -f /scratch/epd-storeV2.db

(5) Restart the epd service and verify the status
/etc/init.d/epd start
/etc/init.d/epd status