What does stopping VirtualCenter Server service do?

I need to truncate the vpx_hist logs on there and need to stop this service. If by stopping that service will end users still be able to login to VMs fine? Just the Vsphere won't be accessible right?

Side note do I even need to stop this service to truncate those logs?

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dave330i

You won't be able to access vCenter server and anything that relies on vCenter (DRS for example) won't work.

pumbaa_g

Might impact other services as well, let me see if I can find the definitive list of things that will not work

sratakhin

I had to reboot a VM hosting vCenter a few times and nothing got broken, except that I couldn't (obviously) access the vCenter console.

blargoe

VM's will continue to run, HA will work, networking will still work even if you use vDS.

DRS will not work
Any backup solutions that are vCenter integrated will not work
Depending on how long you're down you could have gaps in performance history, etc

Do you have to stop vCenter at all for what you are trying to do? I don't know... if you have very many hosts, I would imagine that table would be locked a lot of the time. Probably better to stop the service to be safe.

loxleynew

To give an update I did stop the service although I think I didn't have to. The truncate took maybe 2 seconds to do and then I shrinked the database and ti saved 280gb!

After that I re-enabled the service and Vsphere worked again. I forgot after that I had to defragment the table to get the performance reports loading faster so I ran that while the service was running and it worked fine. So I believe stopping the service was not needed in the end.

Our environment is 15 hosts and 200 VMs. The now new database size is 2gb as opposed to the old one of 283gb.

dave330i

Stopping vCenter isn't a big deal (excluding VDI deployment that's previsioning desktops). It's better to stop vCenter and do your maintenance vs. screwing up your vCenter.

blargoe

loxleynew wrote: »

To give an update I did stop the service although I think I didn't have to. The truncate took maybe 2 seconds to do and then I shrinked the database and ti saved 280gb!

After that I re-enabled the service and Vsphere worked again. I forgot after that I had to defragment the table to get the performance reports loading faster so I ran that while the service was running and it worked fine. So I believe stopping the service was not needed in the end.

Our environment is 15 hosts and 200 VMs. The now new database size is 2gb as opposed to the old one of 283gb.

Did you turn up the statistics level in vCenter Server Settings in the past, by chance? 283GB seems very large for an environment as small as yours.

loxleynew

The statistics were set to level 2 before I got here. I might change them to 1. The database is growing again already gained 4gb over the week-end... This is with the rollups running which seem to be doing nothing. The rows are back to 7 million already. Aren't the rollups supposed to stop the database from growing by deleting rows?

blargoe

Yeah, but in addition to logging more detail, you might be logging more frequent intervals and keeping each level of statistics longer than the default as well. One of my environments is roughly the same size as yours, and my DB is less than 10GB.

What does the Database Size estimator tell you?

Here is what I think are the defaults (what I have set on mine, which I don't think I ever changed)

Duration

Save for

Stats Level
5 Min

1 Day

1
30 Min

1 Week

1
2 Hour

1 Month

1
1 Day

1 Year

loxleynew

Ah checked that out they were setting it up to keep 1 minute interval duration for 5 days! No wonder it was keeping so many rows of data. I changed it to 5 minutes 2 days and will see how that goes. The estimated space dropped to 6.26gb from about 50gb.

now it's
5 minutes 2 days
30 minutes 1 week
2 hours 1 month
1 day 1 year