Version Control Agent hangs

[Melanie Sang]

We are having the exact same problem on all our servers. We are running the latest PSP packs, and the only way to get the VC working is to kill the process on the server. We are getting the same errors as above. Anyone found out yet whats causing the problems?

[Dirk Frey]

Sorry, I also did not found still a solution but some new facts.

I have set up 3 new servers (2k3 R2, 2k8). It is interesting, on these servers the VCA works fine up to now and also in the SIM the Software Version Status is correctly indicated.

On the other hand a complete uninstallation of all HP Agents and reinstalltion with the newest PSP 8.30 does not eliminate the problem.

So it seems in such a way as if the problem is caused by the updates history of the HP Agents.

[dougjef]

Same issue here on hundreds of DL380's. I started seeing an issue with the Version control agent starting in 8.15. 8.25 had the same issue and now 8.30 does as well. Killing the vc process and restarting the service gets the service to respond again..but then after a while if you go to the system management homepage it will timeout until you kill the version control agent again. Very frustrating. Hopefully they will fix this as its impossible to update these programattically now and they have to be manually updated as vc is not responding on hundreds of hosts.

[ajc79]

If it's affecting all your servers, have you had a look at the actual VCRM server rather than VCagents? In my experience, the vcagent can seem to hang the System Management Homepage if it's waiting for the VCRM server to respond.

[ajc79]

dougjef, are you setting you SNMP strings via group policy?

If so, version: 2.2.1.830 of the VC agent has a fix for "VCA causing SMH to timeout when the SNMP community string is set using Group Policy editor"

[ajc79]

Actually ignore that, looks like 2.2.1.830 is the version that comes with PSP 8.30, so you're probably on that already.

I've got a few boxes with this issue too - killing the vcagent process then restarting the service seems to fix it for a while, then it hangs again (via the both the SMH or the vagent page)

There's another thread with the same problem here:

http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1370491

[Stan Oleszkowicz]

I just got off the phone with Support on this issue. We appear to have had some success in at least establishing a work-around.

With a server experiencing this problem, stop the Version Control Agent service. This may require killing the vcagent.exe process from within Task Manager if restarting the service within the Services MMC times out. After the service has been stopped (cleanly or forcibly) start the Version Control Agent using the Services MMC (you may need to refresh the window first if the service timed out when stopping).

Once the VCA has started browse to the System Management Homepage of the server exhibiting the problem and click on the link for the Version Control Agent within the SMH. This work-around should work until the server is rebooted or the Version Control Agent service is restarted. If the server is rebooted or VCA restarted you will have to again browse to the Version Control Agent page within the System Management Homepage to re-establish the work-around.

I have had this work-around in place for only an hour so far (give or take), but expectations are high enough I thought it worth sharing at this point.

What appears to be happening is this:

When VCA starts or stops the all files within the C:\hp\hpsmh\data\cgi-bin\vcagent\cache directory are removed (files only, not folders). If HP SIM does a software status poll to the server before a user manually browses to the Version Control Agent Page then the contents of the C:\hp\hpsmh\data\cgi-bin\vcagent\cache directory are created incompletely. Manually browsing to the VCA page causes the cache files to be created correctly and both HP SMH and HP SIM can collect VCA information successfully.

[Steve weeks_2]

That's not really a viable workaround on approx 200 servers i have where VCA is playing up though.

It would take me a week !

[Rob Buxton]

This does seem to be related to the SW Polling Task.
Can anyone else confirm they get the XML errors at around the same time as the SW Polling task is run?

[NJK-Work]

I have actually had this problem for years - it has been happening long before the 8.x versions.

I agree with Rob - it is definitely related to the SW polling job. It got so bad for me that I ended up disabling the job because it was actually causing problems with the SMH (which seems to be closing tied to the VCAgent - SHM hangs if VCAgent is hung).

I also ended up writting a little batch file to kill the process, restart SHM, and then restart VCAgent:

taskkill /f /im vcagent.exe
net stop sysmgmthp
net start sysmgmthp
net start cpqvcagent

Nelson