Sunday, March 30, 2008
Re: ESX 3.5 new patches released
Keep in mind that if you are running DRS and are leveraging update manager, you may want to modify the default memory cap;
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003638
Excerpt-
Starting with ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5, VMware DRS applies a cap to the memory overhead of virtual machines to control the growth rate of this memory. This cap is reset to a virtual machine specific computed value after VMotion migrates the virtual machine. Afterwards, if the virtual machine monitor indicates that the virtual machine requires more overhead memory, VMware DRS raises this cap at a controlled rate (1MB per minute, by default) to grant the required memory until the virtual machine overhead memory reaches a steady-state and as long as there are sufficient resources available on the host.
For VirtualCenter 2.5, this cap is not increased to satisfy the virtual machine's steady-state demand as expected. Thus, the virtual machine operates with an overhead memory that is less than its desired size, which in turn may lead to higher observed virtual machine CPU usage and lower virtual machine performance in a VMware DRS-enabled cluster.
I hear that they are going to address this in VC 2.5 SP1