Tuning vmware probe performance
Article ID: 34665
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
Occasionally, the vmware probe demonstrates unexpectedly slow performance. This can be demonstrated as the GUI not expanding monitoring subtrees responsively in IM or slow responsiveness in the AC. It can also be manifested as the monitoring interval sweep taking longer than the monitoring frequency. The following config parameters can be adjusted as needed.
Environment
- Release: Any
- Component: UIMVMW
- vmware probe
Resolution
**disable_resource_pool_perf_metrics
This is the major one for collection time improvements. This disables all metrics of type PERF (visible in the GUI) on resource pools. The vCenter has to go to the database to get these metrics, so any IO limitations with the database will be exposed. This also disables perf metrics on Virtual Apps (a special type of resource pool that we track separately).
**show_networks
If NetworkStatus or alarms/events on networks (in the tree @ ?My Resource ->?My Datacenters?->My Datacenter->network) aren't used, this can be set to "no", for minor memory savings and collection time improvement. This is very minor.
**perf_request_batch_size
Defaulted to 100, this controls how many entities we request information for at once. Extremely low numbers (sub 10) produce awful collection times but can be useful for debugging. Some systems seem to get slightly faster collection times by tweaking this parameter. Unfortunately, we have not determined any pattern for when they benefit from increasing it and when they benefit from decreasing it. It seems to be a matter of playing with it.
**disable_host_system_perf_metrics
This is another minor optimization. If no metrics on the System node (or its children) are being used, this can be set to "yes" to save a little bit of memory and a little bit of time in the collection.
**disable_array_metrics
Minor optimization. This disables collection of host virtual switches, host services and VM guest disks. Additionally, if any status info metrics were turned on in the mondef . cfg , it disables them as well.
Finally, increasing the available memory via the startup options can help. If the probe is constantly running near the memory limit, increase the initial memory allocation (-Xms) and strongly consider raising the max memory allocation (-Xmx).
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