VM Overloaded Storage Alarm

The VM Overload Storage Alarm is based on the following values:

  • Number of disk commands aborted
  • Number of disk bus reset commands issued

Excessively high storage demand or improper I/O load configuration in VMware can cause high values for either.

Overloaded storage configurations within a virtual environment are capable of reducing overall performance of any VMware applications operating within it.

Note: Using a network file system datastore will prevent this alarm from triggering.

Definition

VM Overloaded Storage triggers as a result of:

  • Aborted Disk Commands
    Commands already issued to disk may be aborted when operation time-outs are created by storage overload. This can lead to serious VMware application-level performance problems. Storage device  disk command aborts require the immediate identification and correction of the underlying cause. If not, the performance problems will only worsen and potentially result in system downtime.
  • Disk Bus Resets
    Disk bus resets occur as a result of disk subsystems timing out and retrying cancelled commands. HBA device overload or queue depth exhaustion cause this problem. As with abort commands, the underlying cause must be identified and corrected immediately to avoided further performance degradation.

Solutions

See discussion on  Overloaded Storage.

Confio IgniteVM

Confio IgniteVM helps identify the impact of the VM overloaded storage alarm for sites running Oracle on VMware, SQL Server on VMware, and other virtual databases. IgniteVM helps DBAs maintain performance and availability on virtual servers. IgniteVM is the only virtualization-aware database monitoring solution.

Learn more about IgniteVM solutions for: