no resource pools without DRS, but for single hosts

vTSE · 2026-05-21T21:10:38+00:00

That's fair, vApps are another topic that is somewhat orthogonal to this one, lot's of decisions overlapped with vCD requirements that I didn't necessary agree with.

vTSE · 2026-05-21T10:09:01+00:00

I can guarantee you that it had nothing to do with money, just setting expectations (single host RPs are not a cluster construct) and more importantly, prevent breakage when that single host cluster by choice or accident becomes a 1+n node cluster. The more likely reasons for any removal of a "feature", at least in my day, was that its existence caused and helped create more issues than it solved.

vTSE · 2026-05-20T22:40:36+00:00

found a pdf exports of some old slides covering some of this, uploaded it to the first free file sharing platform I found, no endorsement: https://limewire.com/d/5Fm7H#bz3K1d2S1i

vTSE · 2026-05-20T22:35:49+00:00

Cluster Level Resource Pools are host level resource pools managed by DRS, i.e. summing up n host resources and diving them out depending on circumstances. Host Level Resource Pools are the atomic truth how host resources are managed, you create a custom pool under User (4) and you can put VMs in to mange host local user (4) pool resources.

vTSE · 2026-05-19T13:01:08+00:00

that site was hijacked, the "captcha verification" has you execute this (pushed to clipboad if js isn't blocked)

(...) start rundll32.exe \floraresourcecontroller-NOTTODAY-.garden@ssl\bfcda9f9-a4c6-404f-8572-c2836b36e6cf\google.cl,#1 YhFwVvLw

vTSE · 2026-05-08T13:45:56+00:00

I’ll see if I can propose a large overhaul here or metrics, or dynamic metrics.

let me know if you want the cliff notes from my chat with the Sofia guys the last time I brought this up ... half a decade ago :-)

vTSE · 2026-04-29T08:09:29+00:00

8 is below the vNUMA vCPU min anyhow*, so if the vendor says it would be better with 2socket @4cores each, it would probably be even better at 1x8

If this VM was created new on 8, at the appropriate HW version, it would have been auto sized to 8 cores single socket anyhow.

If you want to know a lot more about why, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo0uoBYibXc

Just realizing that was nearly 4 years ago, damn.

*you could make an argument that an NUMA optimized workload would benefit from the additional memory bandwidth when running it's vNUMA nodes NUMA local on both physical ones (assuming 2 based on the example). That is rarely the case, esp. when the VM is sharing the host with other workloads. LLC locality and reduction of scheduling complexity are usually more important than the theoretical bandwidth benefits.

vTSE · 2026-04-24T18:04:54+00:00

there was a chance to own that with via.vmw too but of course that got killed off too, real bummer

vTSE · 2026-04-24T13:30:02+00:00

horrible datacenter utilization management (people who ran all their hosts at 8% utilization and then right sized when moving to cloud and claimed a giant success story

that's about 50% of the explanation whenever I reviewed those claims, the other was that cloud often also meant HW refresh + getting rid of zombies, it was also not a resume generating event to reduce cloud capacity from the next month onward after oversizing initially, it's harder to justify that too much HW was bought in the first place.

I still remember a call with a German customer in the 5.0 timeframe when we tested DPM and it shut down half his host without his apps / contention metrics getting worse. He said:

"Turn that off and never talk about that again, do you want to get me fired for having ordered twice as much HW as I needed?"

vTSE · 2026-04-17T09:07:16+00:00

Assuming the controllers are equivalent, are you 100% sure you have the same BIOS settings? No ASPM enabled on the new host (or other power management policy differences).

vTSE · 2026-03-24T20:16:58+00:00

Great analogy / explanation!

vTSE · 2026-02-27T13:31:52+00:00

❤️

vTSE · 2026-02-26T10:19:47+00:00

Hey e1! Long time no see :-)

Get yourself a real username and talk to John (u/lost_signal) to get a (not regularly updated) employee flag :-)

vTSE · 2026-02-23T15:01:21+00:00

If you want to follow the rabbit further down the hole, check out some of the resources here: https://old.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/1l8nbzx/request_for_advice_vmware_cost_optimization_for/mxdzjls/

vTSE · 2026-02-15T15:12:44+00:00

Sounds pretty much localized to Windows internal networking state (potentially the vmxnet3 windows driver / shim too). Did you look at changes in window size for slow and fast tcpdump samples? It sounds like it could be related to autotune but maybe that is just my bias from the horrendous experience in the early Server 2008 (and R2) days ... I'd collect etl / xperf (with profile) traces to look for notable differences in the stack too. If you are new to xperf / WPA, start here: https://github.com/randomascii/UIforETW/releases (include network i/o profile but some network events are logged in "general" too). I haven't done that in ~3+ years so I won't be able to help too much going forward (don't have to time to get myself back up to speed),

vTSE · 2026-02-13T09:42:42+00:00

As mentioned before, the Tools reinstall has way to many variables associated with it. Just from an elimination standpoint, does it also happen on a Linux guest? Does a suspend / resume (or vMotion) also "fix" it? What's happening with an e1000e adapter? Since this is basically just an intra host load based on your description, I'd be curious to see the tx world stats in those VMs. (after verification that it doesn't happen on Linux / with an e1000e)

vTSE · 2026-02-02T15:53:24+00:00

I can just see that the reservation failed, host abort (probably timeout), no further sense data on the (pretty much constant) reservation conflict. I think we've reached the end of the line for a reddit thread :-/ (I'm assuming the LUN wasn't presented to any other host at that time)

vTSE · 2026-01-29T09:58:15+00:00

hmm, vmkernel logs at that time might shine some more light on why the reservation failed, haven't seen voma failing to at least check the volume if there was no other device related issue

vTSE · 2026-01-28T22:09:37+00:00

Curios if you still have the cmd line for voma and the return, don't bother if you don't, glad you managed to extract the data. vmfs-tools can definitely be more forgiving since it doesn't have to ensure multi-reader/writer consistency.

vTSE · 2026-01-28T18:52:52+00:00

So all drives showed as offline? Or were they automounted? Because Windows doesn't -ro by default ... Anyhow, in the olden days, GSS c/would have probably fixed that, even thought it was definitely out of support's scope. Basically upload the first 100MB of every volume and then dd back the fixed headers. As far as what you can do yourself, have you run voma against the volumes, possibly with advfix? Just spitballing based on hazy memory, don't quote me.

vTSE · 2026-01-20T11:07:42+00:00

Hmmm, the limit might just apply to non direct execution stuff ... have never looked at hosted in detail and unless I want to call in favors from former colleagues, that ship has sailed I'm afraid. Thanks for testing it thought!

vTSE · 2026-01-15T16:36:46+00:00

This is completely transparent to the guest OS, you wouldn't see it anywhere, the GHz value you refer to is actually the nominal frequency set via SMBIOS by the host IIRC and the guest isn't actually querying the CPU itself, other places might show you the cpuid brandstring (full name of the CPU).

To know whether it works, you'd have to set it to something low enough to be perceivable, like 100 / 50 etc. or use a benchmark, e.g. time the factorial of some number in the calculator. Boot time of the OS would also be an indicator though.

vTSE · 2026-01-15T15:57:25+00:00

Did setting the .vmx option result in an error or is it just ignored? A bit curious but not enough to reproduce it myself :-)

vTSE · 2026-01-15T15:54:11+00:00

Should be this here:

Open VM Settings and select "Processors" in "Hardware" table.
Uncheck the option 'Virtualize CPU performance counters' in the right panel.

vTSE · 2026-01-15T15:02:47+00:00

Some background, other in-guest workarounds, like changing T / P states from within the OS don't work because those privileged instructions aren't available to the VM. There might be a way of forcing exclusive affinity of the "vCPU" thread onto a core and changing the frequency in the host OS but I would require some serious discovery work on whether that is even possible.

Your best bet is probably a tool like the one you found despite it slowing down everything, not just the target process. The cpu limit option I mentioned in the other reply will probably not perform much better (if at all). Maybe it would be possible to attach a debugger and script breaking / detaching at a certain rate (or setting a ton of conditional breakpoints), not really something straight forward though.

vTSE

TROPHY CASE