Configuring disks to use VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapters
Details
This article includes supplemental information about configuring and using VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapters.
PVSCSI adapters are high-performance storage adapters that can result in greater throughput and lower CPU utilization. PVSCSI adapters are best suited for environments, especially SAN environments, where hardware or applications drive a very high amount of I/O throughput. PVSCSI adapters are not suited for DAS environments.
Paravirtual SCSI adapters are supported on the following guest operating systems:
- Windows Server 2008
- Windows Server 2003
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5
Paravirtual SCSI adapters also have the following limitations:
- Hot add or hot remove requires a bus rescan from within the guest.
- Disks with snapshots might not experience performance gains when used on Paravirtual SCSI adapters or if memory on the ESX host is overcommitted.
- If you upgrade from RHEL 5 to an unsupported kernel, you might not be able to access data on the virtual machine's PVSCSI disks. You can run vmware-config-tools.pl with the kernel-version parameter to regain access.
- Because the default type of newly hot-added SCSI adapter depends on the type of primary (boot) SCSI controller, hot-adding a PVSCSI adapter is not supported.
Solution
To configure a disk to use a PVSCSI adapter:
- Launch a vSphere Client and log in to an ESX host system.
- Select a virtual machine, or create a new one.
- Ensure a guest operating system that supports PVSCSI is installed on the virtual machine.
Note: Booting from a disk attached to a PVSCSI adapter is not supported. The system software must be installed on a disk attached to an adapter that does support bootable disk. - In the vSphere Client, right-click on the virtual machine and click Edit Settings.
- Click the Hardware tab.
- Click Add.
- Select Hard Disk.
- Click Next.
- Choose any one of the available options.
- Click Next.
- Specify the options your require. Options vary depending on which type of disk you chose.
- Choose a Virtual Device Node between SCSI (1:0) to SCSI (3:15) and specify whether you want to use Independent mode.
- Click Next.
- Click Finish to finish the process and exit the Add Hardware wizard. A new disk and controller are created.
- Select the newly created controller and click Change Type.
- Click VMware Paravirtual and click OK.
- Click OK to exit the Virtual Machine Properties dialog.
- Power on the virtual machine.
- Install VMware Tools. VMware Tools includes the PVSCSI driver.
- Scan and format the hard disk.
Note: In some operating system types, to perform this procedure, you need to create a virtual machine with the LSI controller, install VMware Tools, then change to the drives to paravirtualized mode.