I have discovered that I get much better performance on my VCL virtual machines by changing /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines from being on the local disk of the vmhost, to be a network mount from our NAS system. Given that this is a RAIDed filesytem over numerous disks, it performs much better than the single local disk.
So my vmhosts all mount this filesystem as /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines to contain the .vmdk files of the working virtual machines, and it's been working great. There is one problem with this setup however, when creating images. After an image gets created and is in the process of being reloaded, if the image author requests a reservation for the new image while it is still copying back to the vmhost, and the reservation gets assigned to a virtual machine on another vmhost, the reservation fails because the other vmhost sees the directory in /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines, but doesn't know that the copy is still in progress, and tries to start the vm with incomplete files. I can avoid the problem by telling the image creator to wait about 10 minutes after the image creation has completed before making a reservation for it, allowing time for the copy back to the vmhost to complete. I was wondering however, if a vmhost profile can be created to make the vmhosts aware that /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines is shared between vmhosts. I get confused looking at the different fields in the vmhost profiles as to which ones define where the running virtual machine files are and which ones define where the image repository is. Anyone have any thoughts/guidance on this? Mike Waldron Systems Specialist ITS Research Computing University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill CB #3420, ITS Manning, Rm 2509 Office: 919-962-9778
