View Accelerator (Host Cache) Trouble!

[CyberTron123]

Hi!

I use view 5.1.1 and vsphere/esxi is up to date for the 5.0 branch, 

despite this I really can't get content based host cache to work!

I activate it in view administrator, and on the pool and I see the "option update" on the vcenter

but then when provisioning desktops it just hangs at "configuring virtual disk digest" it stands there for like hours and then the composer failes and I am left with a replica htat is orphaned and so on...

anyone else having this problem ? and how did you solve it?

[CompassionIT]

I was having the same problem along with application crashes. We are in our busy season, so I disabled it.  Things are much more stable now and my composes/refreshs are not timing out.

[gpeterson78]

I'm having the exact same trouble.  I have the same configuration that you do.  View 5.1 on ESXi 5.0.

If anyone could offer any advice it would be most appreciated.

[iforbes]

I'm running View 5.1.2 and ESXi 5.0 U2. The digest takes a long time when creating a Pool, but it eventually finishes that task and my pool is created successfully. I would like to know why the digest creation takes so long.

[Mickelonis]

Check your storage latency during digest creation.

[iforbes]

Looks like it takes long by design:

http://www.vclouds.nl/2012/05/10/how-to-configure-the-view-5-1-vmware-view-storage-accelerator-cbrc/

You will notice, if you use this feature, that the initial creation of the desktop pool will take slightly longer while the digest files are created, especially for the replica images. The digest creation is a compute intensive process. Once the digest is created for the replica image, digest creation for the snapshots and subsequent linked clones is relatively fast.

[gpeterson78]

My cluster is on a brand new SAN and is the only system currently connected to it.  It's on a volume with 90+ 15k spindles, running over NFS via 10GigE.  Latency is essentially non-existant.

It still takes hours and then fails.  I've given up trying to use host caching for now until I can update my ESXi hosts to the latest and greatest.

[iforbes]

How large is your parent vm (GB)? How many ESX servers have you configured host cache on and how much cache did you configure (max 2GB)? I'm running ESXi 5.0 with View 5.1.2 and it doesn't time out for me. Maybe upgrade to latest View build (5.1.2).

[gpeterson78]

Parent VM is 24GB thin provisioned, about 13 actually used.  I have 3 Host servers, I stuck with the defaults for cache size.  I'm definitely going to try updating my platform to the latest version, I'm not too out of date, currently using 5.1.1.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[bretttenney]

For the options update issue, check that the VC user has rights to change advanced options for hosts.  It is most likely trying to enable/modify CBRC. I had the same problem when I first enabled it since it wasn't in the documentation.