vCenter Server 7.0.0c high CPU usage

I updated one of my vCenter servers this morning to the newly released 7.0.0c (build 16620007 / 7.0.0.10600) and after this patch was applied I noticed that the fan noise on my Mac Mini was quite loud. It’s a warm day, but it shouldn’t be audible as the lab was idle post patch. I checked CPU usage of the VMs and I noticed that the vCenter VM was consuming around 70% CPU for the past hour.

I ssh’d into the appliance and used ps to check CPU usage:

ps -eo pid,ppid,%mem,%cpu,cmd --sort=-%cpu | head

Which showed the following:

18007  7068  0.6 81.0 /usr/lib/vmware-wcp/wcpsvc --port 8920 --logfile /var/log/vmware/wcp/wcpsvc.log --configfile /etc/vmware/wcp/wcpsvc.yaml --audit-logfile /var/log/vmware/wcp/wcp-audit.log --incident-logfile /var/log/vmware/wcp/wcp-incident.log

Culprit found! I then simply stopped the Workload Control Plane (WCP) service. However in doing this I am unable to place hosts into maintenance mode. There seems to be no option but to deal with the increased CPU usage, or to roll back, which is what I have done at home.

I’ve raised this issue internally so hopefully there will be a more permanent resolution soon. It might be a good idea to hold off upgrading for now in homelab environments where CPU availability can be constrained.

EDIT

This has been resolved with the release of vCenter 7.0.0.d.