I’d been having a bit of a frustrating time recently with the Profile Driven Storage Service and the Storage Monitoring Service in my vCenter 5.5 system. For some reason they just wouldn’t start. Their health check service would continually fail and give a HTTP 503 Error. The logs were also not very helpful with regard to what was going on. The VMware KB was also no help with this particular issue as it had nothing to do with the known problem around using custom ports for the services. I was almost at a total loss and then I stumbled across the solution.

Going through the logs, searching the VMware KB and Googling didn’t help. Just rebooting hadn’t helped either. Then I noticed that vCenter was consuming a lot of memory. vCenter has become a bit of a memory hog over the versions. Even though I’m not running a huge environment I already had vCenter configured with 16GB RAM, all of which it was already consuming.

I though to myself, I wonder if it’s just because there isn’t enough RAM allocated? I checked my host to ensure I had some RAM to spare and I was in luck. I shutdown my vCenter, logged directly into the host and increased it’s allocated RAM to 24GB.  After the reboot I waited patiently for all the services to start. After all the services had restarted, this is what I was greeted with when checking the vCenter Service Status:

All green lights! Excellent.

Final Word

If you’re Profile Driven Storage Service or Storage Monitoring Service isn’t working. Try giving vCenter some more RAM. It’s a simple solution and might quickly solve your problem. If not, then it’s time to seek additional assistance. As always comments and feedback are welcome.

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.