VMware vSphere

 View Only
  • 1.  Help! SQL VM Server slow to consolidate disks.

    Posted May 01, 2020 08:24 AM

    We have a question regarding our SQL server within the VMWARE in VSphere ESXi enviroment..  We have been experiencing some performance issues in the last 2 days with the SQL server.  In our VMware ESXi 5.5 environment. The server is provisioned for 585GB and has 422 GB used.

    Wednesday night the server seemed to be stuck in a ''Remove  snapshot" task that took over 24 hours. Thursday morning we tried consolidate virtual machine disks at 9:00am usually this process doesn't take very long but at this time it seems to move 1% every 15-40 minutes. The process is currently at 66%.  I tried to remote into the server around 5/1/2020 at 12am and I found that the system process had the  CPU was pegged at 94-97%.  I tried to see if I could kill any non-SQL Process and or try to shut it down and unfortunately I was booted from the remote session. We also tried to console into the server via the VMWARE Vsphere client and we are unable to. We are not able to even shut down or reboot the SQL sever since our options are greyed out.

    Since this is still running at 66% at consolidating virtual disk files, we have no choice but to let the process run its course OR we put the   ESXI host that the SQL server is on into Maintenance mode and then shutdown the host to see if the server can gracefully shutdown.   We 're not sure if this would cause more problems at this point and want to now if you have any suggestions.

    Datastore resides on an ISCI drive.



  • 2.  RE: Help! SQL VM Server slow to consolidate disks.

    Posted May 01, 2020 08:51 AM

    Should we stop and start the VPXA  Service while this is stuck on Disk Consolidation?



  • 3.  RE: Help! SQL VM Server slow to consolidate disks.

    Posted May 01, 2020 10:31 AM

    The data size and transfer rates in this comment are different, but the principle of allowing the process to run etc are the same: Re: Resize Hard Disk - Greyed Out / Have Snapshots for this VM - Unclear what deleting them will do to VM



  • 4.  RE: Help! SQL VM Server slow to consolidate disks.

    Posted May 01, 2020 11:00 AM

    However this is a live production database that we would need users to get back into. Right now the server is slow we cant do anything. Cant we stop the "Consolidating of virtual disks?"

    Can we shutdown the host and VM gracefully?  

    it is now at 68%    



  • 5.  RE: Help! SQL VM Server slow to consolidate disks.

    Posted May 01, 2020 11:47 AM

    No, once snapshot consolidation has started you really should let it run and complete.

    This is why it is not a good idea to leave a VM with a snapshot for any longer than is necessary (during a backup or upgrade)



  • 6.  RE: Help! SQL VM Server slow to consolidate disks.

    Posted May 01, 2020 11:48 AM

    You should also consider upgrading ESXi to a supported version, both 5.5 and 6.0 are already out of support.