I had a ticket open with VMware support on this that went nowhere. They showed me that the zdump generated by the vpxa crash was saying the issue was an out of memory condition but they couldn't explain why. I hadn't personally witnessed the problem in several weeks so I ended up closing my open ticket in the hopes it went away or was fixed on the sly in that CBT patch (current build 3247720). But just experienced another one of these last night on yet another host. I've seen the issue 4 times now for sure, different hosts each time, never the same host twice thus far. This time my syslogs picked up this:

<4>2015-12-30T03:00:07Z host.domain.com Unknown: out of memory [35136]

<182>2015-12-30T03:00:07.220Z host.domain.com vmkernel: cpu28:35977)User: 3816: wantCoreDump:vpxa-worker signal:6 exitCode:0 coredump:enabled

<182>2015-12-30T03:00:07.576Z host.domain.com vmkernel: cpu28:35977)UserDump: 1907: Dumping cartel 35136 (from world 35977) to file /var/core/vpxa-worker-zdump.000 ...





The "out of memory" issue seems to line up with what they showed me previously but still no reason as to why that I can find.





It's highly likely I have had this issue occur more than the 4 times I have personally witnessed as it fixes itself within 20 minutes or so. You either have to happen to be watching when the host disconnects due to the vpxa agent crash or there needs to be something running at the time of the crash that will trip over the disconnected host while crashed. In my most recent case, vRanger reported that it couldn't back up VMs in the middle of the night due to this host being disconnected.





We're actually investigating migrating to a competitor's product as VMware is going downhill in a hurry. The myriad of problems with 6.0 have been a complete disaster for us. VMware support doesn't seem to care at all any more, they just try to get you off the phone as quick as possible, and it's obvious they don't know the product very well, at least compared to my experience level. The VMware KB is always down (it's down again as I write this). With all the turmoil surrounding VMware with the whole Dell/EMC thing, not sure I want to continue investing in a product from a dying company.

