Skip to main content

virtualization - Increasing vCPUs for Server 2003?




I have a VM running Server 2003 and SQL Server 2008 on VMware ESXi. Can I safely assume this configuration can cope with a change to the number of vCPUs? Are there better solutions to address the demands of the guest? More info below...



After an upgrade to software utilising SQL, I'm seeing a notable increase of CPU demand from the SQL server, often up to 100% for a few minutes at a time. Users are complaining of slow response from the software. The VM has only one vCPU assigned. My proposed solution is to increase the number of vCPUs assigned to the VM.



Does anyone have any experience in increasing the amount of vCPUs with this configuration? The only thing that scares me is the warning in vSphere that a change "after the guest OS is installed may make your virtual machine unstable". Reading responses to similar questions, it seems it should work without incident.



Would it be best to also reserve some CPU for this VM or make a change to the processing priority via the resources "shares" property?


Answer



KB888729: How to add processors to a computer that is running Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, ... etc.:





When you restart the computer, Plug and Play detects and installs the
processor or processors.



All versions of Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows
Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and of Windows XP
Professional x64 Edition use the Advanced Configuration and Power
Interface (ACPI) Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC)
hardware abstraction layer (HAL).






  1. Shut down VM

  2. Add CPU/s

  3. Power on

  4. Log in to the VM console, after a minute you get the usual message about needing to reboot for new hardware to work

  5. Reboot




After this you ought to find 2 CPUs (or however many you have if you added more than just 1) in Task Manager.



It's also worth mentioning that this may not help the issue as the performance issue may lie elsewhere, e.g. disk access, poorly written SQL, badly designed tables, etc. Performance tuning SQL servers is an advanced topic all on its own, but adding more vCPU is certainly quick and easy enough to do that its worth trying at least.



I would not start messing with reservations and shares just yet, unless you find that CPU usage on the host is particularly high, which may lead to contention amongst VM guests.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

linux - iDRAC6 Virtual Media native library cannot be loaded

When attempting to mount Virtual Media on a iDRAC6 IP KVM session I get the following error: I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 and: $ javaws -version Java(TM) Web Start 1.6.0_16 $ uname -a Linux aud22419-linux 2.6.28-15-generic #51-Ubuntu SMP Mon Aug 31 13:39:06 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux $ firefox -version Mozilla Firefox 3.0.14, Copyright (c) 1998 - 2009 mozilla.org On Windows + IE it (unsurprisingly) works. I've just gotten off the phone with the Dell tech support and I was told it is known to work on Linux + Firefox, albeit Ubuntu is not supported (by Dell, that is). Has anyone out there managed to mount virtual media in the same scenario?
Post a Comment
Read more

hp proliant - Smart Array P822 with HBA Mode?

We get an HP DL360 G8 with an Smart Array P822 controller. On that controller will come a HP StorageWorks D2700 . Does anybody know, that it is possible to run the Smart Array P822 in HBA mode? I found only information about the P410i, who can run HBA. If this is not supported, what you think about the LSI 9207-8e controller? Will this fit good in that setup? The Hardware we get is used but all original from HP. The StorageWorks has 25 x 900 GB SAS 10K disks. Because the disks are not new I would like to use only 22 for raid6, and the rest for spare (I need to see if the disk count is optimal or not for zfs). It would be nice if I'm not stick to SAS in future. As OS I would like to install debian stretch with zfs 0.71 as file system and software raid. I have see that hp has an page for debian to. I would like to use hba mode because it is recommend, that zfs know at most as possible about the disk, and I'm independent from the raid controller. For us zfs have many benefits,
Post a Comment
Read more

apache 2.2 - Server Potentially Compromised -- c99madshell

So, low and behold, a legacy site we've been hosting for a client had a version of FCKEditor that allowed someone to upload the dreaded c99madshell exploit onto our web host. I'm not a big security buff -- frankly I'm just a dev currently responsible for S/A duties due to a loss of personnel. Accordingly, I'd love any help you server-faulters could provide in assessing the damage from the exploit. To give you a bit of information: The file was uploaded into a directory within the webroot, "/_img/fck_uploads/File/". The Apache user and group are restricted such that they can't log in and don't have permissions outside of the directory from which we serve sites. All the files had 770 permissions (user rwx, group rwx, other none) -- something I wanted to fix but was told to hold off on as it wasn't "high priority" (hopefully this changes that). So it seems the hackers could've easily executed the script. Now I wasn't able
Post a Comment
Read more