- Ralf Hildebrandt Ralf.Hildebrandt@charite.de:
And I'm guessing you're running a 32bit PAE kernel because VMWare ESX still doesn't officially support 64bit guests, correct?
No, it's supported, but I don'T want to change the whole system.
That's right, we cannot switch without having several hours downtime. This is not acceptable. I'm thinking of a way for switching to 64 bit with exchanging disks etc. But I don't know if this will work, I have to test it first.
Is this the only guest on this host or do you have others?
only guest
Yes, the VM-system has 8 CPUs and that's all the ESX has. Of course, there are times, when the ESX doesn't have that much stress so the DRS moves 1 or 2 other machines onto it. But since we got that high load, the rest of the machines all had been moved off the ESX.
If this is the only guest, you have 2 dual core dies in that Xeon CPU, 4 cores total. I assume you've assigned 4 virtual CPUs to this Debian VM?
Yes, something like that
You may want to run top in the hypervisor console itself (or an SSH session into the hypervisor) and watch the %CPU of the hypervisor's kernel threads. That might tell us something as well.
Udo has to answer that, but from what he told me it was fully using all cpus with 2.0, and now it's idling with 1.2
More details to follow (from him)
As I said in the other mail: as long as the load isn't high enough we cannot see any problems in the ESX. Only, if we step over some kind of specific barrier. I think, it's when even the ESX runs out of possibilities to handle so many interrupts.
Bye,
Udo
Udo Wolter Geschäftsbereich IT | Abt. System Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin Campus Benjamin Franklin Hindenburgdamm 30 | D-12203 Berlin Tel. +49 30 450 570847 | Fax +49 30 450 7570600 Udo.Wolter@Charite.de | http://www.charite.de