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vSphere UI behavior change for VM Disk I/O Shares & Limits in vSphere 8.x

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If you use the vSphere UI to configure individual virtual disk I/O shares or limits for a Virtual Machine, it looks like this functionality has been removed in vSphere 8.x in favor of using VM Storage Policies, which has been around for almost a decade now.

Prior to vSphere 8.x, you could configure both disk shares and limits on an individual VMDK as shown in this screenshot below for a vSphere 7.x environment:


While this capability can be useful, it does come with some operational overhead of having to configure each and every virtual disk that has such a requirement and can certainly be error prone. Fortunately, this problem of defining various storage requirements and attributes for a VM and its virtual disks has already been solved with Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) and the use of VM Storage Policies.

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Script - Configure VM Disk Shares (vmDiskSharesMgmt.pl)

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I recently received an email about automating the configuration of VM disk shares. I thought it was an interesting request since I do not know how many people actually make use of this feature. By default, the shares on a virtual disk is set to "normal" or 1000 shares. You can change the value between low (500), normal (1000), high (2000) or a custom value. The following script helps a user to perform a bulk update across multiple VMs and supports multiple virtual disks.

Download: vmDiskSharesMgmt.pl

The script requires that you connect to your vCenter server and provide the following input parameters:

--diskshares_file = Is the name of the diskshares input file that contains the names of the VMs, the hard disks and their corresponding shares value which can be (low, normal, high or custom)

Here is an example of the diskshares input file:

[vi-admin@scofield ~]$ cat diskshares.txt
# [VMNAME];[HDX,SHARES_VALUE]=[HDY,SHARES_VALUE]=[HDZ,SHARES_VALUES]
#
# SHARES_VALUE = low, normal, high, XXXX (custom)
#
# e.g.
# myvm;hd1,low=hd2,high=hd3=2001
#
Synapse;hd1,high
Imager;hd1,low=hd2,1500=hd3,2500=hd4,high
William-XP;hd1,3000

In the above example, we have the following VMs and configurations to be set:

Synapse
Hard Disk1 = high (2000)

Imager
Hard Disk1 = low (500)
Hard Disk2 = 1500
Hard Disk3 = 2500
Hard Disk4 = high (2000)

William-XP
Hard Disk1 = 3000

Here is an example execution:

Here we verify one of the VMs "Imager" and it's configured disk shares:

Hopefully you will find this script to be useful