VMware agent performance tuning for Large Environments for FVE 7.x + (4258802)

With a larger vsphere environments, you will encounter partial collections. Typically, symptoms will include sporadic inventory and performance collections.

Under "Vmware Environment | Administration", click on the alarms section next to the agent to determine, if full collection cycles have completed.

Large environment edits now take place in only two places.  The memory settings in agent.manifest (same path as before) will now control Foglight Agent Manager (FglAM) heap. There is no need to edit the vm.config (the vm.config file will no longer exist on new installations).

Memory settings:

Default memory for VMware agent is 2.5 GB and it needs to be increased in larger environments

Go to <FGLAM_HOME>\agents\VMwarePerformance\<Version Number>\config\agent.manifest

In this file there are two lines that read:

<jvmarg value="-Xmx2560m"/>
<jvmarg value="-Xms2560m"/>
 
These are the values, that set the JVM memory used by the agent. By default they are set to 2.5G. To increase this value, change the number after -Xmx and -Xms.

To increase this to 4G of JVM Heap change this to:

<jvmarg value="-Xmx4096m"/>
<jvmarg value="-Xms4096m"/>

max-queue-size and max-disk-space change

Queue and disk size are now controlled only in master fglam.config.xml which can be found in the <FglAM_Home>\state\default\config directory. The recommendation is to set it to 200MB.

<config:upstream max-queue-size="-1" max-disk-space="204800" max-batch-size="500"/>

<config:downstream max-queue-size="-1" max-disk-space="204800" max-batch-size="500"/>

</config:queue-sizes>

For upgrading customers

The upgrade procedure requires the user to upgrade FglAM to 5.6.10 prior to upgrading the VMware agent. The procedure in the upgrade guide is for FglAM to be upgraded before deploying the new agent package. If the user does not read the upgrade guide, there are dependencies in the cartridge and logic in the UI to prevent the user from upgrading the agent/deploying the agent package until FglAM is 5.6.10. This is important because moving the agent to in-process requires FglAM 5.6.10.

After deploying the new agent package, FglAM will restart automatically and the agent will be brought in-process.

As with previous upgrades, upgrading the agent package will overwrite any previous edits of the agent.manifest file. So these will need to be reset.  The values set here will now set the memory for FglAM.

However, to be conservative and to avoid breaking existing installations, if there were any memory settings in the master FglAM vm.config file prior to upgrade, these will be inherited and copied into the new file baseline.jvmargs.config.  Master FglAM will now run with the heap settings that are the addition of what was previously set in vm.config + agent.manifest. This will leave the overall memory footprint the same as before upgrading. However, this is being done to be conservative and we do not believe the additional memory is required.

The vm.config file will no longer exist for new installs. It has been split into two files:

client.config for fglam setting and baseline.jvmargs.config for setting VM parameters

For upgrading customers, these two new files will inherit the values from the previous vm.config. (the old vm.config file will not be deleted, but will no longer be used.)

Master FglAM fglam.config.xml file will inherit previous values for queue and disk so these should not need to be touched for upgrading customers.  For future customizations (FglAM 5.6.10+) we can set to 200MB  for large environments as noted above.

<config:upstream max-queue-size="-1" max-disk-space="204800" max-batch-size="500"/>

<config:downstream max-queue-size="-1" max-disk-space="204800" max-batch-size="500"/>

</config:queue-sizes>

fglam.config.xml for the OOP agent no longer exists and so there are no queue or disk settings to edit.