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Experimenting with ESXi CPU affinity and Intel Hybrid CPU Cores

01.16.2024 by William Lam // 21 Comments

After debugging a recent issue with using VMware Workstation and Intel Hybrid CPUs, it gave me an idea about an experiment to try with ESXi and Intel Hybrid CPUs.

As a refresher, starting with the Intel 12th Generation (Alder Lake) CPU, a new hybrid big.LITTLE CPU architecture was introduced for consumer Intel CPUs. This new hybrid Intel CPU architecture integrates two types of CPU cores: Performance-cores (P-cores) and Efficiency-cores (E-cores) into the same physical CPU die. For more information about this new hybrid Intel CPU design, check out this resource HERE. The ESXi scheduler does not and has no current plans to support this new Intel Hybrid CPU architecture, especially as this type of architecture is nowhere to be found in traditional Enterprise datacenters and is only limited to Intel Consumer CPUs.

The current recommendation to work around the non-uniformity of the CPU cores is to either disable the E or P-cores within the system BIOS, thus making the system "uniform" and allowing ESXi to run like a normal x86 system. While you can apply a workaround to have ESXi ignore the non-uniformity of the CPU cores, in addition to the non-deterministic behaviors, random PSOD can also occur due to scheduling across two different types of cores.

I was curious to see whether applying ESXi CPU affinity on a VM using Intel Hybrid CPU Cores might yield a different outcome?

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab Tags // Intel

Quick Tip - New method to mark HDD to SSD in ESXi 7.x and 8.x using ESXCLI

01.04.2024 by William Lam // 3 Comments

I recently helped a colleague who wanted to mark an HDD device in ESXi to show up as an SSD, which may be needed if the storage device was not correctly detected or if you are using Nested ESXi and the underlying storage is not an SSD and you need to mark it as an SSD for use with vSAN OSA or ESA.

The easiest way to accomplish this operation is by using the vSphere UI, but that does require vCenter Server to be up and running, which it was not. Alternatively, you can also perform this operation using ESXCLI and configure an Storage Array-Type Plugin (SATP) claim rules, which had been possible since 2013 but it looks like the old method no longer works in the latest ESXi 7.x and 8.x releases.

Note: If you are configuring this for a Nested ESXi VM, another method is to emulate a virtual SSD as shown in this blog post.

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab, vSphere 7.0, vSphere 8.0 Tags // esxcli, hpp, ssd

VMware Flings are back!

12.14.2023 by William Lam // 15 Comments

In addition to the big announcements from yesterday on major simplification of the new VMware by Broadcom offers and licensing model and the new chapter for the VMware Desktop Hypervisor products, I have one more piece of exciting news that I would like to share with our users, just in time for the holidays! 🎁

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab, NSX, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Tanzu, vRealize Suite, VSAN, vSphere Tags // fling

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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Recent

  • Programmatically accessing the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG) 05/06/2025
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