I’ve never been a huge fan of agents in the Service Console. Too many times I’ve seen hosts fail because of an agent that had a memory leak etc. Now it seems that running the HP IM agents causes your ESX 3.5 U2 to become unavailable after a certain amount of time.
The errors that appear:
0 Z root 8536 3673 0 79 0 – 0 nct> Aug05 ? 00:00:00 cimservera
0 Z root 8537 3673 0 79 0 – 0 nct> Aug05 ? 00:00:00 cimservera
0 Z root 8543 3673 0 78 0 – 0 nct> Aug05 ? 00:00:00 cimservera
0 Z root 32350 3673 0 79 0 – 0 nct> Aug06 ? 00:00:00 cimservera
0 Z root 32351 3673 0 79 0 – 0 nct> Aug06 ? 00:00:00 cimservera
0 Z root 32352 3673 0 79 0 – 0 nct> Aug06 ? 00:00:00 cimservera
0 Z root 32353 3673 0 78 0 – 0 nct> Aug06 ? 00:00:00 cimservera
HStrydom on the VMTN forum posted the following:
I am having the same issue. What happens after 17 days is that there are about 32000 of these processes. ESX has a max value of +- 32000 PID’s. Thus when all have been used up, one cannot SSH into the server, log in from the console or the ESX server disconnects from VC.
Also we have HP servers with the HP agents loaded. Our Dell servers does not have this problem.
Have a look at your cron log, /var/log/cron & cron.1. you might see that some of the job have not run. Also look in your /var/log/messages. There is a lot of login failures.
In other words, if you see the same thing happening call HP and let’s hope they release a fix soon! And in the meanwhile start thinking about ESXi, it’s problems like these that makes you think about why you even need a Service Console in the first place.
I was just about to install the HP agents on my test ESX servers. Thanks for the heads up as now I’ll wait for a new release before I test the waters.