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You are here: Home / New vSphere 5 HA, DRS and SDRS Advanced/Hidden Options

New vSphere 5 HA, DRS and SDRS Advanced/Hidden Options

07.21.2011 by William Lam // 7 Comments

While testing the new HA (FDM) in vSphere 5 during the beta, I had noticed a new warning message on one of the ESXi 5.0 hosts "The number of heartbeat datastores for host is 1, which is less than required: 2"

I wondered if this was something that could be disabled as long as the user was aware of this. Looking at the new availability guide, I found that two new advaned HA have been introduced relating to datastore heartbeat which is a secondary means of determining whether or not a host has been partitioned, isolated or has failed.

das.ignoreinsufficienthbdatastore - Disables configuration issues created if the host does not
have sufficient heartbeat datastores for vSphere HA. Default
value is false.
das.heartbeatdsperhost - Changes the number of heartbeat datastores required. Valid
values can range from 2-5 and the default is 2.

To disable the message, you will need to add this new advanced setting under the "vSphere HA" Advanced Options second and set the value to be true.

You then need to perform a reconfiguration of vSphere HA for this to take into effect. One method is to just disable/re-enable vSphere HA and the message is now gone. If you know you will have less than the minimal 2 datastores for heartbeating, you can configure this option when you first enable vSphere HA.

I was curious (obviously) to see if there were other advanced options and searching through the vpxd binary, I located some old and new advanced options that maybe applicable to vSphere DRS, DPM and SDRS.

Disclaimer: These options may or may not have been properly documented from my research/digging and it is most likely not supported by VMware. Please take caution if you decide to play with this advanced settings.

Setting Description
AvgStatPeriod Statistical sampling period in minutes
CapRpReservationAtDemand Caps the RP entitled reservation at demand during reservation divvying
CompressDrmdumpFiles Set to 1 to compress drmdump files & to 0 to not compress them
CostBenefit Enable/disable the use of cost benefit metric for filtering moves
CpuActivePctThresh Active percentage threshold above which the VM's CPU entitlement cap is increased to cluster maximum Mhz. Set it to 125 to disable this feature
DefaultDownTime Down time (millisecs) to use for VMs w/o history (-1 -> unspecified)
DefaultMigrationTime Migration time (secs) to use for VMs w/o history (-1 -> unspecified)
DefaultSioCapacityInIOPS Default peak IOPS to be used for datastore with zero slope
DefaultSioDeviceIntercept Default intercept parameter in device model for SDRS in x1000
DemandCapacityRatioTarget unknown
DemandCapacityRatioToleranceHost DPM/DRS: Consider recent demand history over this period for DPM power performance & DRS cost performance decisions
DumpSpace Disk space limit in megabytes for dumping module and domain state, set to 0 to disable dumping, set to -1 for unlimited space
EnableMinimalDumping Enable or Disable minimal dumping in release builds
EnableVmActiveAdjust Enable Adjustment of VM Cpu Active
EwmaWeight Weight for newer samples in exponential weighted moving averagein 1/100's
FairnessCacheInvalSec Maximum age of the fairness cache
GoodnessMetric Goodness metric for evaluating migration decisions
GoodnessPerStar Maximum goodness in 1/1000 required for a 1-star recommendation
IdleTax Idle tax percentage
IgnoreAffinityRulesForMaintenance Ignore affinity rules for datastore maintenance mode
IgnoreDownTimeLessThan Ignore down time less than this value in seconds
IoLoadBalancingAlwaysUseCurrent Always use current stats for IO load balancing
IoLoadBalancingMaxMovesPerHost Maximum number of moves from or to a datastore per round
IoLoadBalancingMinHistSecs Minimum number of seconds that should have passed before using current stats
IoLoadBalancingPercentile IO Load balancing default percentile to use
LogVerbose Turn on more verbose logging
MinGoodness Minimum goodness in 1/1000 required for any balance recommendation; if <=0, min set to abs value; if >0, min set to lessor of option & value set proportionate to running VMs, hosts, & rebal resources
MinImbalance Minimum cluster imbalance in 1/1000 required for any recommendations
MinStarsForMandMoves Minimum star rating for mandatory recommendations
NumUnreservedSlots Number of unreserved capacity slots to maintain
PowerOnFakeActiveCpuPct Fake active CPU percentage to use for initial share allocation
PowerOnFakeActiveMemPct Fake active memory percentage to use for initial share allocation
PowerPerformanceHistorySecs unknown
PowerPerformancePercentileMultiplier DPM: Set percentile for stable time for power performance
PowerPerformanceRatio DPM: Set Power Performance ratio
PowerPerformanceVmDemandHistoryNumStdDev DPM: Compute demand for history period as mean plus this many standard deviations, capped at maximum demand observed
RawCapDiffPercent Percent by which RawCapacity values need to differ to be signicant
RelocateThresh Threshold in stars for relocation
RequireMinCapOnStrictHaAdmit Make Vm power on depend on minimum capacity becoming powered on and on any recommendations triggered by spare Vms
ResourceChangeThresh Minimum percent of resource setting change for a recommendation
SecondaryMetricWeight Weight for secondary metric in overall metric
SecondaryMetricWeightMult Weight multiplier for secondary metric in overall metric
SetBaseGoodnessForSpaceViolation -1*Goodness value added for a move exceeding space threshold on destination
SetSpaceLoadToDatastoreUsedMB If 0, set space load to sum of vmdk entitlements [default]; if 1, set space load to datastore used MB if higher
SpaceGrowthSecs The length of time to consider in the space growth risk analysis. Should be an order of magnitude longer than the typical storage vmotion time.
UseDownTime Enable/disable the use of downtime in cost benefit metric
UseIoSharesForEntitlement Use vmdk IO shares for entitlement computation
UsePeakIOPSCapacity Use peak IOPS as the capacity of a datastore
VmDemandHistorySecsHostOn unknown
VmDemandHistorySecsSoftRules Consider recent demand history over this period in making decisions to drop soft rules
VmMaxDownTime Reject the moves if the predicted downTime will exceed the max (in secs) for non-FT VM
VmMaxDownTimeFT Reject the moves if the predicted downTime will exceed the max (in Secs) for FT VM
VmRelocationSecs Amount of time it takes to relocate a VM

As you can see the advanced/hidden options in the above table can be potentially applicable to DRS, DPM and SDRS and I have not personally tested all of the settings. There might be some interesting and possibly useful settings, one such setting is SDRS IgnoreAffinityRulesForMaintenance which ignores the affinity rules for datastore maintenance mode. To configure SDRS Advanced Options, you will need to navigate over to the "Datastore" view and edit a Storage Pod under "SDRS Automation" and selecting "Advanced Option"

More from my site

  • How Fast is the New vSphere 5 HA/DRS on 64 Node Cluster? FAST!
  • Automating Storage DRS & Datastore Cluster Management in vSphere 5
  • There's a new mob in town, FDM MOB for ESXi 5
  • Running ESXi 5.0 & 5.1 on 2012 Mac Mini 6,2
  • That's so cool! Running ESXi 5.0 & 5.1 on Apple Mac Mini

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // esxi5, fdm, ha, SDRS, vSphere 5.0

Comments

  1. depping says

    07/21/2011 at 1:17 pm

    Good post but I would like to stress that unless VMware Support specifically requests to modify the advanced SDRS/DRS/DPM settings these should not be modified!

    Reply
  2. William says

    07/21/2011 at 1:19 pm

    @depping,

    Agreed! Hence the disclaimer before the goodies 🙂 Per the Beta release, IgnoreAffinityRulesForMaintenance is actually set by default with 0 ... curious if that'll be the case in GA

    Reply
  3. Ashish says

    09/22/2011 at 5:15 am

    Thanks it worked...

    Reply
  4. Carlo says

    09/29/2011 at 4:16 pm

    Great Post William. Clearing up warnings in my lab today and the Datastore Heartbeat setting was just what I needed.

    Thanks.
    CARLO.

    Reply
  5. 電腦會說話 says

    03/15/2012 at 2:22 pm

    I build the vsphere5 test enviroment,

    but can`t see the HA Advanced Options in VC

    really strange

    this is the similar discuss

    http://communities.vmware.com/message/2001984#2001984

    Reply
  6. tatyanamomot2013 says

    11/04/2014 at 2:06 pm

    ПОМОГИТЕ НЕВИННЫМ ДЕТЯМ

    Reply
  7. _n0ff says

    08/11/2020 at 10:29 am

    IgnoreAffinityRulesForMaintenance should apply to hosts as well. it super sucks that for example 3 hosts, with 3 vm's with an affinity rule to run on separate hosts will fail to go to maintenance mode.

    Reply

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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