6.5.2 High CPU Utilization

[kevin_abel]

Hi,

I am running 6.5.2 with 10+ guest VMs. My host computer has enough power to handle this load. What I am finding though is that everything is fine when I first boot the VMs and everything settles. (guests are almost 0 % utilization, Host cpu utilization approx. 10%) The problems occurs after everything has been running for a while. (not sure the exact timeframe, 30 minutes to several hours.) The guests aren't under any kind of workload but are now averaging 20% utilization, and the host is averaging 30% utilization. If you run any app on the guests it is very slow to respond and pushes guest utilization to 100%. I am not sure when this started happening, I have been using workstation since v5.5, but I have never been running this many VMs at once.

Guests include 32 bit w2k3, 64 bit w2k8, and some xp clients. Host is XP 64 bit, 24 Gb ram, 2 X dual core xeon 2Ghz, 5 X Velociraptor 300Gb hd.

As you can imagine rebooting this many VMs all the time isn't a great option. I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

Thanks,

Kevin

[KevinG]

From your vmware.log file

Your host system does not guarantee synchronized TSCs across different CPUs, so please set the /usepmtimer option in your Windows Boot.ini file to ensure that timekeeping is reliable.

See Microsoft KB for details and Microsoft KB for additional information.

Have you done this already?

[kevin_abel]

I will try this and get back to you asap.

Thanks.

[kevin_abel]

I have applied the setting in boot.ini and rebooted, however I am still seeing the problem. Task manager shows cores 0 and 2 with more than twice the utilization of 1 and 3, if this helps at all????