Vmware Slot Size
My slot size is 32Mhz/80MB. Maximum number of CPU slots I can have is 328.25. Maximum number of RAM slots 40963/80=512.0375 which defines the number of total slots as HA chooses the most restrictive number (a worst case scenario). As you can see HA shows 511 total slots in the cluster. But we do not use vCPUs anymore to determine the slot size for CPU. The slotsize for CPU is determined by the highest reservation or 256MHz (vSphere 4.x and prior) / 32MHz (vSphere 5) if no reservation is set. However, vCPUs can have an impact on your slot it can have an impact on your memory slotsize.
By Duncan Epping, Principal Architect.
On the VMTN forum today someone asked how it was possible that the “used slots” exceeded the “total slots”. This is what their environment showed in vCenter:
- VMware HA Slot is the default admission control option prior to vSphere 6.5. Slot Size is defined as the memory and CPU resources that satisfy the reservation requirements for any powered-on virtual machines in the HA cluster.This article is just to cover how the HA slots are calculated step by step not more than that.
- If you work with VMware Workstation on your Windows PC, you've probably noticed how the virtual machine disk image can become quite large very fast, especially if you are running Windows 7 or Windows 10 as a guest OS. Luckily, there are a couple of ways you can shrink the size of the virtual disk to a more manageable size.
HA Advanced Runtime Info:
Slot size 4000Mhz
4 vCPUs,
4232MB
Total Slots in Cluster 16
Used Slots 66
Available Slots 0
Total Powered on vms in Cluster 66
Total Hosts in cluster 2
Total good host 2
You can imagine this person was very surprised to see this. How can you have 66 slots used and only 16 total slots available in your cluster? There are two possible explanations:
- Admission Control is disabled
- A reservation was set on a virtual machine after all virtual machines were powered on, skewing the numbers
Let’s tackle number 1 first. If you disable admission control the vSphere UI will still show the slot size and the number of slots etc, it just won’t do anything with it…
With regards to the second explanation it might be easier to give an example:
Just imagine you have 2 hosts and HA does its calculations and you have 100 slots available. You power-on 100 VMs. Now you set a reservation on a VM, this reservation will change the slotsize. HA does it calculations again based on this new slotsize. This will result in only 25 slots available based on this new slotsize. However you already used 100 slots. In other words, now you have 25 totals slots and your used is 100.
This post is the follow up post for my previous post on VMware HA Slot Calculation. In that post, i have explained the step by step procedure for how to calculate the HA slot information. This post clarifies more on the Total Slots, Used Slots & Available slots in VMware HA Slot calculation. I strongly recommend to read my previous post on HA slot calculation to fully understand the concepts of this post.
Vmware Slot Size Policy
