Troubleshooting growth of the vCenter Server database

There are many circumstances when the vCenter Server database grows excessively. Growth of the vCenter Server database is due to data being collected and stored in the database. This data falls into three categories:

• Performance data
• Log of tasks that were performed
• Log of events that occurred

Performance data, in most cases, causes the most growth of the database. When troubleshooting excessive growth of the database, start by examining where the growth is occurring. You can use this to determine how to troubleshoot the issue.

It may be necessary to truncate the information in the database. However, this should never be the first step. Diagnose the issue completely, first, if at all possible. In many cases, the amount of data is too large to process in the given amount of time. For example, if there is more data that is being collected than can be processed in the same period of time, or if it takes several months to process the data, it may be better to simply truncate the data. In these cases, it is dependent on your business requirements as well as the cause of the growth.

• To validate where the growth of the database is occurring, see Determining where growth is occurring in the vCenter Server database (1028356).
• After determining the applicable tables, see Purging old data from the database used by vCenter Server (1025914).
• If you see growth in the transaction log, see Troubleshooting transaction logs on a Microsoft SQL database Server (1003980).

For more info refer this KB