CPU Profiling Struggle

[rKNotty]

Evening all,

I'm having abit of trouble profiling the vCPU use of an application within my companies VMware Infrastructure, it is the application server for our payroll system.

For the vast majority of the month it performs no real CPU intensive actions (simple application server that is pointed to ia a web interface) but for 2/3 days a month when it is running payroll the CPU use goes though the roof.

For those 2/3 days it requires up to 4 vCPU assignments to handle the load, however for the rest of the month it can get by on only 1, the issue that I am having is that while the server is under load usage users are complaining of slowness when the 4 vCPU allocation is set (high Ready time) and if i leave it low (1 vCPU) the payroll bombs out.

Any ideas of the best way to address this?

Any help would be great.

Thanks.

Rich.

[lenzker]

One option might be to set reservation or high shares on the CPU resource. Probably with a scheduled task for specific times during the month.

but beware, if you give the payroll machine a high reservation/share it will probably influence the CPU performance of the other VMs running on the host. How many esxi hosts do you have and which license?

[rKNotty]

The cluster in which that VM sits only contains 2 hosts. We have Enterprise Plus licensing.

I was thinking something along the lines of a scheduled CPU limit to reduce the resource avalible in the quiet time, good to know I was on the right lines.

[lenzker]

I strictly don't recommend to use CPU limits when it's not necessarily needed. Which machine do you want to limit?

Try to optimize your environment with shares first ( change them probably dynamically regarding to your workload/business need )

imho make use of shares/limits only when there's no other way to handle specific workloads, but for this discussion we have no enough information

[BrownUK]

Looks like you need another host