How-to enable PvSCSI and when
VMware Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI driver)
Introduced with vSphere 4 this driver can speed up and offload CPU. VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapter is able to achieve 12% more throughput with 18% less CPU cost compared to the LSI virtual adapter.
vSphere ships with this new high performance virtual storage adapter. Bus logic and LSI logic were the only choices so far. PVSCSI is best suited to run highly I/O intensive applications in the guest more efficiently (reduced CPU cycles)
Before you activate and configure take into consideration that:
- VMware does not support PVSCSI on the operating system boot partition, VMs will need to be configured with separate virtual disks(.vmdk) for the boot drive and the data drive. It means that the only way you can use PVSCSI is on your DATA drives.
UPDATE: This is no longer the case. Now VMware supports pvscsi for boot disks. You can have a look here to see an elegant way of changing into pvscsi.
- You can’t use PVSCSI on a VM which is configured for Fault Tolerance protection. (BTW if the VM has FT enabled, it can’t use VMXNET3 either…). See the requirements and limitations of FT here.
The actual step-by-step for Windows you can follow here or Linux here.
Some good read about PVSCSI and separating the Boot and Data partitions you can find on Rich Brambley’s blog as well
For some more documentation and(or) how-to, some more links:
For linux VM:
For Windows VMs:
vSphere Performance whitepaper (VMware)
What’s new in vSphere Storage whitepaper (VMware)
Related Posts :
Speed up your Guest VM with paravirtual SCSI adapters: PVSCSI is part of vSphere 4 I wrote an a ...
Do I choose the PVSCSI or LSI Logic virtual adapter on ESX 4.0 for non-IO intensive workloads? ...
How-to avoid BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) when you want to change from LSI Logic paralel into PVS ...
New paravirtualized SCSI adapter is more optimized SCSI adapter than the LSI virtual Adapter. Th ...
SSH is blocked by default for the root user. To enable the root access You'll need to edit t ...
Other posts from Server Virtualization
- New upgrade webpage for ESXi 4 pushes us to the right direction?
- You know how to collect diag information when your ESXi does PSOD?
- Use PVSCSI or not for lower intensive workloads
- Hardening guides for vSphere 4
- NTLDR missing - silly but can happend
- How To Shrink VMware Virtual Disk Files and disable shrinking
- vSphere Quick Start guide bonus download..
- ESXi - the past, the present and the future
- Farm commander - management tool for VI and TS or Citrix Farms
- How to collect log information from vCenter Server 4
- How to know where is my VM if vCenter is down?
- New patches for ESX 4 and ESXi 4
- Use VMware Converter to import 3rd party VMs, for example Virtual Iron's VMs
- Windows XP installation as a VM - trouble to see the disk or not?
- Vmware HCL for ESXi 4
- Time keeping for Windows VM's best practices
- Virtu-Al releasing 3rd update of PowerPack
- Not even tried Appspeed and new version is already available!
- Starwind active-active HA availability storage
- Multiple update VMware Tools how-to
- Re-release of ESX 4 update 1
- New major update to ESX 3 - Update 5
- Jumbo frames are supported only on VMxnet 3 and enhanced VMxnet
- Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper-V installed on Server with Xeon 5500 Nehalem processor
- How to increase the amount of RAM assigned to the VMware ESX service console
- Back in bussiness
- Changement from LSilogic paralel into pvscsi
- vCloud Express by VMware
- Project Onyx, for non scripting people...
- New feature with VMware vSphere Update 1
