Good Afternoon,
Since upgrading to ESXi 5.1 last fall, we have been experiencing a problem with the ramdisk filling up on our hosts. I have not yet been able to determine the cause, but when the ramdisk hits the wall, it is almost impossible to troubleshoot. It usualy appears after 20 or so days of continuous uptime. Once the ramdisk becomes full, it is not obvious that there is a problem untill you do something like a vmotion. Then it fails with the following message:
A gereral system error occured
If you look at the host events, there are many of the following types of entries:
The file table of the ramdisk 'root' is full. As a result, the file
/var/lib/vmware/hostd/journal/1358360282.17 could not be created by
the application 'hostd-worker'.
error
1/16/2013 11:18:02 AM
So I attempt to start SSH on the host to see if I can find what is taking up all of the space. I go to Configuration -> security profile -> services properties, and enable SSH. It appears that ssh has started, but in fact it has not. It looks like ssh will not start due to the fact that the ramdisk is full. The same thing happens with enabling the local console access. So now I am stuck. I have about 30 production vm's that are stuck on this host with a condition that only a reboot seems to fix. Has anyone else seen this issue?
Thanks,
Andrew Watson