Continuous storage I/O throughput from ESXi hosts despite minimal virtual machine workloads

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Continuous storage I/O throughput may be observed from ESXi hosts, even when virtual machine workloads are minimal.
While the I/O throughput from a single host might be small, it can accumulate across multiple hosts and result in a significant load on the storage system.

Symptoms:

• Storage I/O throughput from ESXi hosts remains at a constant rate (e.g., several MB/s), despite minimal VM activity.
• The total I/O throughput from multiple ESXi hosts causes a noticeable load on the underlying storage array.

Environment

VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 3

Cause

The continuous storage I/O is generated by the frequent execution of the esxcfg-info command, which is called by the svhcp service to collect system data.
This hardware management service runs in the background when ESXi is installed using a Fujitsu custom image.

Resolution

To address this issue, contact your hardware support vendor (Fujitsu) to receive support and consult with them to determine whether the svhcp service can be safely stopped, to obtain instructions on how to disable it if applicable, or to inquire about an available solution.