Advanced configuration of VMs on ESXi

On the Abiquo platform, you can easily perform the following configuration of VMs on ESXI using the Abiquo UI or API

vCPU hotplug: enable hot-add disks for the VM template
use VMXNET3: select the NIC driver for the template
configure dedicated CPU resources
configure dedicated memory resources
Use Eagerzeroedthick virtual disks for data and log disk: edit the disks and select the EAGER_ZERO_THICK allocation type

For more details, see Modify a VM template.

This page describes how to set further advanced configuration for VMs on ESXi. An example configuration could be as follows.

numa.vcpu.preferHT = TRUE (no default)
CPU/MMU Virtualization Option = automatic
halt_in_monitor = TRUE (no default)
idleLoopSpinBeforeHalt = TRUE (no default)
sched.cpu.latencySensitivity = normal (default)
tools.guestlib.enableHostInfo = FALSE (default)
sched.swap.vmxswapenabled = TRUE (no default)
hw version=14 (the newest version will be installed when deploying a new VM)
ethernetX.coalescingScheme = disable (no default)

You can set this configuration with VM variables before deploy only

To set advanced configuration for a VM:

Edit the abiquo.properties file on the Remote Services server
1. For each configuration element, set a property with a variable for the configuration with the following format:
  
  com.abiquo.esx.variable.variableKey.esx.property.name=TRUE
  For example, to set a variable key of "schedwapen" to configure "sched.swap.vmxswapenabled" with a value of "TRUE".
  com.abiquo.esx.variable.schedswapen.sched.swap.vmxswapenabled=TRUE
To activate the configuration, edit the VM template or the VM
1. Go to Variables and set a variable with the key "variableKey" from the abiquo.properties
  For example, "schedswapen".
  The VM would then have the configuration setting "sched.swap.vmxswapenabled" set to "TRUE".
  The platform does not use the value of the variable, so you can set any value except an empty value. We recommend that you set it to the value of the ESXi variable.

Additional example

To set "ethernet.coalescingScheme" to "disable" for all NICs, you can use an X to represent all NICs.

So you could set the following property in abiquo.properties, with the variableKey of "ethxcoalsch".

After setting the VM template variable, or VM variable as follows:

The resulting configuration of the VM in the hypervisor will be: