Database resources high

[2201cthomas]

What could be the cause of high cpu resources for my vcenter 64bit SQL database server?

[2201cthomas]

Resources are not allowing my VCenter servers to be powered on at times and response is degrading

[jdptechnc]

2201cthomas wrote:

What could be the cause of high cpu resources for my vcenter 64bit SQL database server?

Could you tell us more about your setup?  Are all of your vCenter roles on the same VM, is SQL on the same VM, how much CPU did you allocate to them, etc?

How many hosts and VMs are you managing?  How many CPUs/cores per host?

SQL Server can be a CPU and memory intensive application at times, and for VMware, it is going to spike in activity when statistics are updated or if there is a flurry of events or tasks to be logged, for example.

[2201cthomas]

Host-21,  VMs-236,  13Hosts-8CPUsx 3GHz 4Cores per socket and 4Host-12CPUsx 2.66GHz 6Cores per socket

vCenter and SQL are on separate servers.

SQL is 2008 on a 2008 R2 VM. 4CPU’s 24gb mem

CPU and Memory are at default values

The SQL server is literally losing time due to the high CPU

All profiles for logging into SQL server are using temp profiles due to problems on SQL server

[weinstein5]

How many vCPUs per VM?

[2201cthomas]

Host-21,  VMs-236,  13Hosts-8CPUsx 3GHz 4Cores per socket and 4Host-12CPUsx 2.66GHz 6Cores per socket

vCenter and SQL are on separate servers.

SQL is 2008 on a 2008 R2 VM. 4CPU’s 24gb mem

CPU and Memory are at default values

The SQL server is literally losing time due to the high CPU

All profiles for logging into SQL server are using temp profiles due to problems on SQL server

[jdptechnc]

Do you have any CPU limits set on the VM?

Is the sqlservr.exe process actually using all of the guest CPU on the SQL Server VM (as shown in Windows Task Manager or Resource Monitor), or is it another process, or is it "System"? If it is the System process, you could be encountering latency in the kernel (for example, long wait times accessing your system's vmdk file due to storage latency), which would require further troubleshooting.

If it's the SQL Server process, you probably just need to allocate more vCPU to the machine.  If you're running ESXi 5.x or higher, you add multi core vCPUs, which would get you around the 4 CPU constraint found in Windows Standard Edition.  If you really want to know exacly "what" vCenter is doing with SQL Server to cause the spikes in CPU, Activity Monitor in SQL Server Management Studio could tell you the biggest consumers of CPU within SQL Server.