PowerFlex UI unavailable/Cannot stop Presentation Server

Symptoms

One or more of the following symptoms occurs:

• Cannot connect to PowerFlex UI
• PowerFlex UI unresponsive
• The Presentation Server (mgmt-server) process cannot be gracefully stopped

Impact

• The system cannot be administered using the PowerFlex user interface
• Presentation Server's host shutdown process may be delayed

Root Cause

A software issue may cause the Presentation Server process to become unresponsive after prolonged use.

Workaround

Forcefully terminate the Presentation Server process.

Note down the process ID (PID) of the Presentation Server.

ps -ef |grep -v grep |grep com.emc.vxflexos.webui.backend.Server

In the sample output below, the PID of the Presentation Server is 39449.

mgmt-se+ 39449 1 9 Jun22 ? 1-09:40:08 /bin/java -Xmx4g -Djna.tmpdir=/opt/emc/scaleio/mgmt-server/tmp -Djava.io.tmpdir=/opt/emc/scaleio/mgmt-server/tmp -Dstorage.diskCache.bufferSize=2000 -Dlog4j2.configurationFile=/etc/mgmt-server/.config/log4j2.xml -cp /opt/emc/scaleio/mgmt-server/lib/* com.emc.vxflexos.webui.backend.Server -d metaData.dbType=Persistent

Terminate the Presentation Server process.

Replace with the PID noted down in the previous step.

Start with a normal kill:

kill <pid>

If this did not kill the process, (re-run the ps command above to verify) step up the kill command like this:

kill -HUP <pid>

If this did not kill the process, (re-run the ps command above to verify) step up the kill command again like this:  

kill -9 <pid>

The reason User should not go to the last one first is that -9 does not give the process time to clean up after itself. Kill -9 should only be used as a last resort generally.