High CPU in HA Cluster

[Gooose]

Good Morning all,

I'm running ESX3.5 Update 4 in an HA environment consisting of 4 ESX servers (IBM3850 - M2)

Each ESX server has 4 Quad Core CPU's. 16 CPU's

I notice yesterday on one of my ESX servers that 15 of the CPU's were working at around the 10>20% mark, however 1 of the CPU's was reporting 99%.

I'm obtaining this information using vFoglight.

Can anyone advise as to why just one of the 16 CPU's would be getting thrashed? Shouldn't the load be distributed evenly across the CPU's?

Any thoughts in respect to the above would be greatly appreciated.

Steve

[timparkinsonShe · Accepted solution]

Is the CPU continously pegged at 99%?

Have you run top on the service console? Also esxtop?

I see this behaviour fairly regularly, and it's ftPerl (part of the HA software) that's the culprit. Reconfiguring for HA for the host in the VI client fixes it.

[cybulsk]

ESXTOP is a great way to get a better look at what is happening on a host. How many VM's on the host and what are they doing? Do any of the VM's show an alert on the CPU in virtual center? the load wont necessarily be evenly distributed across the cores, keep in mind that once the vmkernel schedules a VM for time on a core it is going to try to allow that VM to keep using that same core in order to take advantage of the hardware features like caching. Having a DRS cluster doesnt mean that the vmkernel is going to parallelize the VM processing and distribute the load across multiple physical CPUs (or cores).

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[Gooose]

Hi Tim, many thanks for your reply.

I've just ran the 'top' command from the console and as you suggested ftPerl is consuming approx 98% CPU.

Cheers for your help

[timparkinsonShe]

No worries!

I have seen some talk on the forums about this problem -I think the suggested solution is to trash the HA cluster and then recreate it, which seems like a bit of a sledgehammer approach to me.

Cheers,

Tim.

[bulletprooffool]

Do you have any VMs with processor affinity set? Are they thrashing the CPU?