Performance Data Not Available After vCenter 4.1 Upgrade

Following an upgrade of vCenter to 4.1 does your performance data look like this?

or even emptier like this?

Then you are probably suffering from the same issue I was after an upgrade of vCenter from 4.0 to 4.1. Initally a web search brought up the following KB article, kb.vmware.com/kb/1004382, but this did not resolve the issue.

VMware Support then directed me to the following KB article which appeared to describe the issue more accurately, kb.vmware.com/kb/1030819 . Applying the fixes resolved the issue for me, note it takes at least 24 hours after carrying out the fix for the views to look back to normal. Hopefully you have a helpful DBA to assist you, if not there is one part of the article which is not that obvious - or I thought so anyway.

The step “….****run the create view command for these views available in the schema definition file located at the vCenter Server installation directory….”, doesn’t specify what file you are actually looking for. A bit of further research will lead you to VCDB_mssql.sql, typically located in C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\VirtualCenter Server .

Inside this file you will find four sections which will contain the SQL code needed to recreate the views, I’ve listed the header of each.

/*==============================================================*/ /* View: VPXV_HIST_STAT_DAILY                                   */ /*==============================================================*/

/*==============================================================*/ /* View: VPXV_HIST_STAT_WEEKLY                                  */ /*==============================================================*/

/*==============================================================*/ /* View: VPXV_HIST_STAT_MONTHLY                                 */ /*==============================================================*/

/*==============================================================*/ /* View: VPXV_HIST_STAT_YEARLY                                  */ /*==============================================================*/

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Overall I have not been very impressed with the upgrade process of vCenter from 4.0 to 4.1, it has been far from smooth (see here and here) and seems to suffer from issues which could have been avoided and again makes me feel that VMware’s major releases and updates do not get tested well enough.

Overall this particular issue with performance data is not very impressive because:

  • It would seem obvious that maybe the installer should check during the upgrade if the datatype of the stat_val column in the database is set to INT and if so make the necessary corrections
  • The above is particularly true becuase an almost identical issue is detailed for a previous product version, did they not learn from this? kb.vmware.com/kb/1015606
  • This issue is detailed in two different KB articles with the same issue and resolution, 1030819 and 1031676! kb.vmware.com/kb/1030819 and kb.vmware.com/kb/1031676 (I have informed support about this and they have said they will clean it up)

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Would be interested to hear of other experiences with the 4.1 upgrade……

Update 09/02/11

To clarify one point, during the time between you carry out the vCenter upgrade and the time to implement the SQL fix, performance data will NOT be recorded! So the sooner you get the fix in the better.