I recently completed a vCenter 5.1 update for a customer and notice a few days later that the vCenter service had stopped.  Restarted and logged in to find the following error: “A general system error occurred”  “Could not allocate space for object dbo.VPX_TEXT_ARRAY” in VIM_VCDB, etc.

Checked the disk that the DB was located on and confirmed there was plenty of space. Turns out the default limit for SQL Express had been reached.  I followed the following article to resolve this issue: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=1025914
First, I stopped the vCenter Service.

Expanded the VIM_VCDB DB, selected Tables & Opened the dbo-VPX_PARAMETER table.

Modify event.maxAge to 30, and modify the event.maxAgeEnabled value to true.

Modify task.maxAge to 30, and modify the task.maxAgeEnabled value to true.

Scroll down on the left, expand Programmability, Stored Procedures.  Right-click on dbo.cleanup_events_tasks_proc, select Excute then OK on the following screen to run the produce.

Finally once this has completed, shrink the database & restart the vCenter Service