Excessive CPU utilisation being reported

[gheywood]

I have a Windows 2000 VM running on ESX 3.5.

VC is reporting an alarm on "virtual machine CPU usage" for the VM. If I look at the actual guest, it is 95% idle in Task Manager (yes I know that doesn't always mean much!).

If I look at the host, the VM in question is using vast amounts of CPU and memory. The VMWare Tools column is reporting "ToolsOK".

Can anyone suggest anything else to do/check? I have reboot the VM with no change, and also migrated it from host to another (incidentially, not specifically for this problem)...

Thanks

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[weinstein5]

Does this quiet down overtime? Does it only occur when you start up the VM? What application are you running on this VM?

[gheywood]

No, not just at startup, it can be like that days later. It is only running double-take (file replication). It has SQL installed, but it is not running (set to manual). Apart from that, not much else. It is running the iSCSI initiator, but no anti-virus programs...

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[admin]

What version of VC? Sounds like the problem where alarms aren't reset after being triggered, which was fixed in one of the VC updates.

[big_vern]

I've seen this happen to us when the memory limit (on the Reosurces tab for the VM) was set lower than the configured memory, which was causing the memory ballon driver to operate and this raised cpu levels.

[gheywood]

Thanks guys. Looks like it is Double-take after all. On W2K3 we don't have many problems, but on W2K it seems much more resource hungry. I will stick them in a seperate resouce pool, and we will live with it until we migrate those to a newer OS or away from Double-take.

Cheers

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