I noticed a trend recently on one of our vCenter servers where the disk space on the C:\ drive kept running low. The OS being run is Windows Server 2008 R2. Eventually if the disk fills up, the vCenter service will fail and stop.
I used the free utility “TreeSize” to inspect the drive and see where all the disk space was being used up – the culprit was the C:\ProgramData\VMware\Infrastructure\Inventory Service\Logs\wrapper.log file – sitting at a massive 16GB in my case.
By default this log file seems to be configured to have no limits in size. I am not sure what caused the log file to grow so rapidly over the course of a week or so, but I’m sure closer inspection of the contents of the log file will reveal more detail.
For now, I will just point anyone having a similiar issue to the steps required to enable log rotation and file size limit on this wrapper.log file, which will prevent your vCenter server from running out of disk space. These steps are taken from a VMware KB article, which I will link to below.
High level process is as follows:
- Stop vCenter service
- rename the wrapper.log file to something else (e.g. wrapper.log.bak) – after everything is up and a new log file is in place, this could be compressed and stored away, or deleted
- open up the configuration file at C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Inventory Service\conf and locate the wrapper.conf
- edit the following two lines to change to:
- wrapper.logfile.maxsize=100m (original value is 0)
- wrapper.logfile.maxfiles=2 (original value is 0)
- Save the file and close it
- Start the vCenter service again
The actual VMware KB article details the above process.