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rgcda
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

running collections against many machines at one time

If I setup a collection to check the patch status of machines and I assign it to all windows machines when I run it will it automatically launch the process on every machine at the same time or does it only do a certain number at a time before going onto others.  I'm concerned that if I run this against 400 windows virtual machines it might cause some type of I/O storm.  I was wondering if I should break out the machine it runs against so that there isn't any type of I/O storm or whether VCM will limit the amount of collections running at one time.

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RobertDiMarzio
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Starting in vCM 5.7, you can use the "Default maximum number of concurrent agent activities per host" setting in Administration > Settings > General Settings > Collector in conjunction with vCenter collections.  The agent collection process is not typically very cpu intensive, but there are some collections (like Event Viewer) that can cause spikes.  Since this setting is a new feature with 5.7, there is no established baseline for the value.  If you have load balancing in vCenter, there may be some better consistency the effect of this setting.  I would think that the value could start at 25% of the number of guests, but please experiment to find the optimum value.  Keep in mind that too low of a value can adversely affect how long collections will run.

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