VMware Cloud Community
sgunelius
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Enabling HugePages

I've opened a support call with HP/VMware on this issue and while I'm waiting on their response, I thought I'd try the community.  We've recently started virtualizing some of our more demanding Oracle environments and our DBAs reported that the latest VM we deployed (Oracle Linux 6.4) doesn't have HugePages enabled.  I would think this setting would need to be done at the Guest rather than the Host, but am not entirely sure.  Thank you in advance for any insight you can offer.

Scott

Reply
0 Kudos
3 Replies
MKguy
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Please post the output of the following commands from the guest OS:

# cat /proc/cpuinfo

# cat /proc/meminfo

# cat /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled

# numactl --hardware

# numactl --show

Does the VM have more than 8 vCPUs? I'm not sure but I think large memory pages might require a NUMA topology on the guest OS. By default ESXi only presents a virtual NUMA topology to the guest if the VM is configured for more than 8 vCPUs.

-- http://alpacapowered.wordpress.com
Reply
0 Kudos
SBALASUBRAMANIA
Contributor
Contributor

Huge pages has nothing to do with NUMA, regardless of whether vNUMA is enabled (by default on vcpu > 😎 or not, huge pages is a Guest OS thingy.

nr.hugepages needs to be setup in /etc/sysct.conf along with use_large_page parameter in Oracle init/spfile

Sudhir Balasubramanian Staff Solution Architect & Oracle Field Practice Lead (CPBU TMM) Oracle ACE & Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=19297:3 VMware vExpert https://vexpert.vmware.com/directory/1038 Member of the Office of the Chief Technical Ambassador VMware (Alumni) VMSIG Technology Advisor http://vmsig.org/about/ https://communities.vmware.com/people/SBALASUBRAMANIAN http://vracdba.com/ | https://blogs.vmware.com/apps/author/sudhirbalasubramanian/ https://community.oracle.com/blogs/sudhirb “Virtualizing Oracle Business Critical Databases on VMware SDDC” - A Comprehensive authority for Oracle DBA’s on the subject of Oracle & Linux on vSphere: https://www.amazon.com/Virtualize-Oracle-Business-Critical-Databases/dp/1500135127
Reply
0 Kudos
nfaf1
Contributor
Contributor

Hello,

Sorry to hijack this thread but I have this exact problem.

I am running ESXi 6.7 and I have enabled hugapages support as per Huge Pages

but this still doesn't do anything

cat /proc/meminfo | grep -i huge

AnonHugePages:    329728 kB

ShmemHugePages:        0 kB

HugePages_Total:       4

HugePages_Free:        4

HugePages_Rsvd:        0

HugePages_Surp:        0

Hugepagesize:       2048 kB

This should be to 1G

The other parameters seem to go well:

cat /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages

4

Can someone help ? as my container doesn't start because of this ....

[  496.326645] hugetlbfs: Unsupported page size 1024 MB

[  497.030697] hugetlbfs: Unsupported page size 1024 MB

[  497.632851] hugetlbfs: Unsupported page size 1024 MB

[  498.237018] hugetlbfs: Unsupported page size 1024 MB

.....

Thank you

Nuno

Reply
0 Kudos