{"id":594,"date":"2010-07-23T09:33:26","date_gmt":"2010-07-23T08:33:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vmdamentals.com\/?p=594"},"modified":"2010-07-23T09:33:26","modified_gmt":"2010-07-23T08:33:26","slug":"vcenter-4-1-and-cpu-usage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vmdamentals.com\/?p=594","title":{"rendered":"vCenter 4.1 and CPU usage"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a very tiny testing environment, which I just upgraded to vSphere 4.1. I chose to reinstall the vCenter server on a 64bit Windows 2003 VM with a local SQL express installation, having only 1GB of memory and a single vCPU. I know this is against best practice, but I like to follow the much older best practice to “start out small” like VMware has been (and still is) preaching about. So I started out small. Although 1GB of memory is not even really small for my measures \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

I quickly noticed that the VM was running fine at first, but soon started hogging CPU resources, and was hardly responsive. vCenter 4.1 could not have grown to such a resource eater I figured. So I checked to settings of the Windows server, and I changed the swapfile size to a fixed value (the system managed size can have impact when growing).<\/p>\n

To have a look at the SQL settings, I decided to download and install the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express tool, which can be obtained here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Looking into the settings, I noticed that SQL is set to take all memory it can (the max value was set at 2TB I believe). I changed that setting to 768MB, meaning SQL can use 768MB as a maximum, leaving 256MB for “the rest” (read: vCenter and VUM). If needed you might fiddle with this setting.<\/p>\n

After changing these values, vCenter began to respond properly. Sometime the VM gets really busy, but quickly returns to “normal” behaviour; no more “stampede”. <\/p>\n

Take care: This is in no way meant for a full-blown production environment. Always follow VMware’s best practices…<\/strong> But if you have a test environment which is really REALLY small, consider these changes to extent the life of your single socket, dual core ESX nodes by a year (or possibly two) \ud83d\ude42 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a very tiny testing environment, which I just upgraded to vSphere 4.1. I chose to reinstall the vCenter server on a 64bit Windows 2003 VM with a local SQL express installation, having only 1GB of memory and a single vCPU. I know this is against best practice, but I like to follow the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vmware"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vmdamentals.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vmdamentals.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vmdamentals.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vmdamentals.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vmdamentals.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=594"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.vmdamentals.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":601,"href":"https:\/\/www.vmdamentals.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594\/revisions\/601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vmdamentals.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vmdamentals.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vmdamentals.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}