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by Duncan Epping

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3.5

Add multiple SCSI controllers to your VM to improve performance

Duncan Epping · Feb 12, 2008 ·

[edit 18-02-2011: It has come to my attention that the info in this article was incorrect / outdated. The LSI Logic has a default queuedepth of 32. Even if the LSI could go higher than 32 it would be capped by either the device queue depth or disk.schednumreqoutstanding. To enable a single VM to have a queuedepth larger than 32 the pvscsi card should be used and for optimal performance all layers should be aligned.)

A couple of months ago at the Dutch VMug meeting Bouke-Jumé gave some good storage tips. This is one of them:

The LSI Bus Logic Controller / Driver has a standard queue depth of 256. Although it isn’t possible to set this higher it is possible to add a second controller and when you make sure the SCSI ID of your disk corresponds to the SCSI card you will have another queue of 256. This can lead to improved performance for Database Servers, Fileservers and other I/O intensive VM’s.

Open the properties of the VM,
For the first disk and SCSI Controller 0 go to the virtual disk and select 0:X
For the second disk and SCSI Controller 1 go to the virtual disk and select 1:X
And so on…

Vinternals: howto disable the Capacity Planner

Duncan Epping · Feb 12, 2008 ·

Vinternals wrote a short article on how to de-install or hide the Capacity Planner plugin for VirtualCenter:

Capacity planner is rather pesky to have hanging around on every VirtualCenter box in the enterprise… especially if you use some other tool for the job! So just add this line to the end of your VirtualCenter install script:

msiexec /qn /x {2A2750C9-E14E-4635-8595-C1CD214445B0}

and away she goes!

Altenatively, you can simply hide it from the Virtual Infrastructure client by adding the following in the section of vpxd.cfg

<vcp2v>
<dontstartconsolidation>true</dontstartconsolidation>
</vcp2v>

Issue with performance stats in VirtualCenter?

Duncan Epping · Feb 11, 2008 ·

I noticed at a few customer sites that the Performance tab of VirtualCenter was getting sluggish but never got the chance to really pinpoint the problem. A couple of days ago user “jterpstr” posted about this on the VMTN forum and it seems that the old rows aren’t deleted from the database for some reason. The table grows to an enormous amount of rows which causes some queries to become unresponsive or very very slow. For more info and a possible solution keep track of this topic om the forum. Thanks to the guys in this thread for pinpointing the problem and narrowing it down to a possible cause.

Howto: Rename a VM

Duncan Epping · Feb 10, 2008 ·

There are a couple of ways to rename a Virtual Machine, but there are two in my opinion that stand out:

  1. Shutdown the VM
  2. Rename the VM in VirtualCenter
  3. Migrate the VM and move it to another Datastore
  4. done!

And from the service console:

  1. vmware-cmd -s unregister /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm/vmold.vmx
  2. mv /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-old /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new
  3. cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new
  4. vmkfstools -E vm-old.vmdk vm-new.vmdk
  5. find . -name ‘*.vmx*’ -print -exec sed -e ‘s/vm-old/vm-new/g’ {} \;
  6. mv vm-old.vmx vm-new.vmx
    for every file that hasn’t been renamed (.vmsd etc.)
  7. vmware-cmd -s register /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vm-new/vm-new.vmx
  8. done!

Distributed Power Management glitch

Duncan Epping · Feb 8, 2008 ·

I was just testing the new, but still experimental feature, Distributed Power Management. I’ve installed 3 ESX Hosts and added all of them into an HA-DRS Cluster. I enabled DPM and set the mode to manual and pressed “Generate recommendations”. I had one host with an HA failure and DPM recommend me to switch off another host. Which in this case would leave me with no host for redundancy… weird.

I’ve also witnessed that the host with two VM’s running on it was recommended for a power down, instead of the host that did not have any VM’s running.

The VMware website states:

 When resource requirements of workloads increase, DPM brings powered-down hosts back online to ensure service levels are met.

I guess having a full working HA cluster is definitely top priority to meet service level agreements, so be careful with this option and test it really well…

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About the Author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist and Distinguished Engineering Architect at Broadcom. Besides writing on Yellow-Bricks, Duncan is the co-author of the vSAN Deep Dive and the vSphere Clustering Deep Dive book series. Duncan is also the host of the Unexplored Territory Podcast.

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