Hello folks,
If someone could help me clear my understanding would be wonderful.
Have some doubts and questions around virtual machine snapshot and stunning of VM. Basically, I understand stunning is freeze of virtual machine and it can happen when consolidation (snapshot removal) is carried out. Basically VM is not useful when it's stunned. Also further I understand that VM with high I/O are more likely to be stunned due to nature of it's workload. For example MS Exchange or SQL DB box.
However, I fail to understand what is meant by asynchronous and synchronous consolidation and 5 min, 10 min etc. iterations? Further as mentioned in below KB consolidation of VM is performed in asynchronous mode and VM is NOT stunned for upto 9 iterations. However, after max iterations, synchronous consolidate is forced where the VM is stunned and a consolidation is performed.
The KB goes onto and suggests installing updates and patches for various versions to prevent synchronous consolidate happening which will prevent stunning of VM and hence VM would remain available.
I want to know from others what they do for consolidating a VM that has high I/O when consolidation doesn't complete in asynchronous manner?? This is especially true when you're already running those patches/upgrade or higher version already. Any thoughts/ideas would be good..