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There's alert coming up on our server saying CPU Contention even if we already isolate that VMguest from another high CPU consuming VMguest:

Alert Definition Name: Virtual Machine on a host with BIOS power management not set to OS controlled is facing CPU contention Alert

Definition Description: Virtual Machine running on a ESXi host with power management not set to OS Controlled in the BIOS is facing CPU contention.

Does changing my Host BIOS configuration to the recommended settings would really solve the issue?

Need advice before taking down the servers for BIOS reconfiguration that likely a solution

VR-4
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1 Answers1

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Determine if you have a performance issue. Measure performance quantitatively: request response time for services, queries per second from databases, ESXi guests with significant %READY CPU.

VMware thinks hardware power saving features are limiting maximum performance. This especially matters for latency sensitive or high CPU utilization environments.

Disabling power saving features is platform and vendor specific. Likely it means host downtime. Eventually, do this change at a scheduled maintenance time. Unless the performance issue is urgent, this might be able to wait until you do things like hypervisor or firmware updates.

Performance issues are complicated, no easy way to tell if tweaking power savings will help with the "CPU contention" issue. Should quiet VMware complaining about the hardware power management, however.

John Mahowald
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