Hi,
I've attempted to perform quite a bit of researching regarding my issue, however, I don't seem to be getting a 'good' answer resulting in action items / a way to resolve my issue.
I have many VMs, which seem to occasionally experience high memory usage, more 90%, or spiking to 100% usage. However, I never get an alert in VMware. In fact, if you check the performance alerts, in either VMware Console, or in vRealize Operations Manager, it only reports I am hitting 70%-80% usage.
Windows Server 2012R2, Task Manager
Real time report in vCenter VMware Console
This is making it difficult for us because we have traditionally relied on VMware reporting for alerting on these events, not Windows reporting.
My research keeps circling me back to Large Memory Paging as the issue. I am reading, that if I turn off LMP, my issue will go away, and reporting will be fine. However, if I turn it off, I may experience reduced performance. As you can imagine, I don't want that. Unfortunately, most of the articles I find regarding this 'issue', are 3-6 years (or more) old; I haven't found anything recent/current.
What I don't know is, how long this has been an issue, however we first noticed it about 2 weeks ago and have noticed it on multiple VMs (at least 10 VMs). The only recent change to our environment was installing the latest patches/updates/builds from VMware about 4 weeks ago. I've been working in this environment for almost 4 years (I've been working with VMware since ESXi 3.5), and 2 weeks ago was the first time I've seen this issue. So, was there a patch released that caused this? Or is this something that we've likely always had, and I am just now noticing?
I am running VMware 5.5.0, 4345813. vCenter on Server 2008R2.
Any help or insight on this matter would be good. I haven't opened a support ticket for this, as I am not sure what, if anything they could do for this.
I'm willing to test turning off Large Paging, but I wouldn't be able to touch any production servers until after Jan 7 (we freeze production changes during the holidays). I also wouldn't know where/how to test performance impact to our applications. Unfortunately, our application teams don't partake too much in testing with the infrastructure team (they usually claim to only have time to move forward with 'projects' (new customers, new projects, etc), not operational stuff).
Thoughts?
Thanks,
NR