On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 11:25 AM, Mike Haudenschild <m...@longsight.com> wrote: > Good morning -- > > I have two questions regarding computer settings in VCL -- the "RAM," "No. > Processors," and "Processors Speed (MHz)" settings when creating computers, > or editing computer information from the Manage Computers tab. > > Note that I'm using VCL exclusively with ESXi 4.1, manually installed (no > xCAT). > > 1. Am I correct that these settings are irrelevant for my VMWare host > computer because ESXi was manually installed (i.e. not provisioned via > xCAT)?
Yes. The VM host hardware values aren't currently used. They will be used at some point in the future to determine host capacity/utilization in order to improve the scheduling of reservations. It's not important to set these accurately because the code will automatically retrieve the values from the host and update the database. > 2. I've watched the VCL bootcamp videos from NCSU this past summer, and > there was a comment that these settings apply only to virtual machines -- > specifically, to match requested images up with available VMs. However, > end-user reservations are getting hardware based upon what was configured > for the original image, not what I've subsequently specified when adding > individual VM "computers" or "slots." For example, the base image was > created with a 2GHz processor and 512 MB RAM. When a reservation is made > using a VM that I've set as having only 256MB RAM and a 1GHZ processor, > those settings seem to be ignored -- the original hardware settings from > the image (2GHz, 512MB RAM) are assigned to the VM slot. The VM hardware settings are used in 2 ways: 1) By the scheduler to locate a computer that meets the requirements set in the image profile. This is the same for VMs and bare-metal computers. If your VM is set to 256 MB and your image is set to 512 MB, reservations for that image shouldn't be scheduled on that VM. Is this what you're seeing? If so then there's a problem with the scheduling code. 2) By the provisioning module to construct a VM. The RAM and CPU values for the image are normally used. If your image is set to 1 GB RAM and your computer is set to 2 GB, the VM will have 1 GB. There are a few caveats. There is a hard-coded minimum RAM value of 512 MB. This is done to prevent unusable VMs from being created if the image profile RAM setting is set to 0 or a very low value. If your computer is set to 1 GB and your image is set to 256 MB, the VM will be assigned 512 MB. There are other RAM minimums higher than 512 MB depending on the OS of the image being loaded. I don't recall all of them off hand but for example I believe 32-bit Windows 7 is 1 GB, etc. -Andy > Thanks to everyone on the list -- you've all been so helpful as I'm getting > to know VCL. > > Regards, > Mike > > -- > *Mike Haudenschild* > Education Systems Manager > Longsight Group > (740) 599-5005 x809 > m...@longsight.com > www.longsight.com
