As I have deployed vCloud Automation Center 6.0.1 in my home lab on vSphere 5.5, the installation worked flawlessly as I have carried out the same installation several times in production for several customers before. vCAC seemed to work without any problem at all for few hours, then I started getting the following error every time I tried to access my vCAC Portal:

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Service Temporarily Unavailable 

The Server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

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Below is a screenshot of the actual error:

I was surprised to see the above error, and when checked the status of my vCAC Services under the services tab in the appliance management console of vCAC the pages was not loading although all the other tab were working just fine. I logged in through ssh to the vCAC Appliance and restarted the vCAC Service using the following command:

# service vcac-server restart

After restarting the vCAC Service and waiting for about 5 minutes, I have noticed that all the services of vCAC is now showing up on the service tab and right after that the vCAC portal started to function again. Initially I thought the service might hanged for some reason or so on, but after few hours the same issues came up, and I have noticed that I am getting the same problem repeatedly every few hours where my services stop again. I have decided to dig further, and in the Catalina.out log file I have noticed some IOPs error message that I can not remember the exact text of it and I could not find it again after I have fixed the problem, and that’s why I could not document it in this blog post.

No wonder I have not seen this problem in production environments, as they had much faster disks than I had. I have a single SATA drive where the full vCAC components and other management VMs like vCenter is running. To make it even worse I have deployed the vCAC Appliance as a thin disk VM. I have then decided to see if converting my VM disk to thick eager zeroed disk and see if that fix the issue. It has been 10 days since I have last faced that problem and since I have applied this fix my home lab vCAC environment is working smoothly. I have thought to share this as I am sure others will face such a problem in their home lab and will be looking for a hint on how to fix it. Hope this help!