100 percent CPU usage on 1 CPU in ESX host

[VirtuallyTaken]

Hi all,

I have an ESX host in a cluster. I come in this morning and this host is showing 100 percent CPU for CPU 0. This is a SUN Fire X4600 M2 box with 8CPUs. There are no alarms being generated for this. This started happening from Sat moring at around 4am. There are no CPU affinity rules. The average CPU usage of this box ia around 30 to35percent. Has anyone experienced this? If so how did you resolve it? Howdo you check what processes are using CPU 0 in the service console or anywhere else?

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[DSTAVERT]

You can use esxtop from the console.

c will show the individual CPUs.

[DSTAVERT]

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx2_using_esxtop.pdf

man esxtop will give you some additional info

I'll look for a later DOC.

[wila]

Hi,

CPU0 is mostly used by the service console and for management purposes.

I would check your host log files and see if there's something out of the ordinary in there.

You could have hardware problems that it is desperately trying to log details about.

--

Wil

_____________________________________________________

VI-Toolkit & scripts wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

[VirtuallyTaken]

Thanks for the info guys. I will take a look at the hostd log.

DSRAVERT.... The c option just shows individual CPUs of the host and their usage, not what processes are being scheduled by that particular CPU.

Cheers

[DSTAVERT]

A little more useful than that.

http://pubs.vmware.com/vi3/resmgmt/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=resmgmt&file=vc_esx...

[VirtuallyTaken]

Hi all,

Thanks for all the help. Found the solution. Its the (pegasus)cimserver that was taking up all the CPU0 resource. This is an issue with memory leak for ESX 3.5 updates 2, 3 and 4. No such issue with ESX 4 as pegasus component is not used. Here is the workaround if you have this issue: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=100960...

Cheers