Serious performance impact on high IO VM with multiple snapshots

Recently I ran in to a situation where a customer suffered severe performance issues on a virtualized SQL server. In the SQL server we noticed a high CPU utilization, but the underlying ESX hosts only showed relatively low CPU utilization for this VM.

Debugging the VM performance issue with esxtop showed very high co-stop (%CTSP) vallues.

According to the vSphere Monitoring and Performance guide, %CTSP is

Percentage of time a resource pool spends in a ready, co-deschedule state.
NOTE You might see this statistic displayed, but it is intended for VMware use only.

Funny how VMware expresses this metric is only to be used by VMware 🙂 Continue reading

vCenter 5.1 upgrade removes permissions in vCenter in non AD environment

While upgrading vCenter to 5.1 in an environment where we used local authentication on the vCenter server, we were in for a little surprise.

The original vCenter server had a lot of custom roles and user permissions defind, on all kinds of objects in vCenter.

When we did the upgrade, we decided to install the SSO server on a separate server, and when we did the vCenter upgrade and it was registered with the SSO server, we suddenly received a message that users and groups where not found on the SSO server, which kind of made sense, since even though we recreated the users and groups on the SSO server, they had different security IDs. But what we did not expect, is the upgrade process decided to remove all non existing users and groups from the vCenter database, effectively removing all permissions from vCenter … Continue reading

ESX hosts not registering on EMC VNX (and fix)

While working on an upgrade to vSphere 5.0U1 on a Cisco UCS environment, where the ESX hosts boot from SAN, I noticed one of the hosts was not registered correctly on the EMC VNX, as it showed up as unmanaged. Because the ESX hosts boot from SAN, the host has to be registered before it can auto register, and when it was registered manually  the host was not able to update the registration. Continue reading