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ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere 10.3

Configure ESXi host settings

Contributors netapp-jani

Configuring ESXi server multipath and timeout settings ensures high availability and data integrity by allowing to seamlessly switch to a backup storage path if a primary path fails.

Configure ESXi server multipath and timeout settings

ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere checks and sets the ESXi host multipath settings and HBA timeout settings that work best with NetApp storage systems.

About this task

Depending on your configuration and system load, this process might take a long time. The task progress is displayed in the Recent Tasks panel.

Steps

  1. From the VMware vSphere Web client home page, select Hosts and Clusters.

  2. Right-click a host and select NetApp ONTAP tools > Update host data.

  3. On the shortcuts page of the VMware vSphere Web client, select NetApp ONTAP tools under the plug-ins section.

  4. Go to the ESXi Host compliance card in the overview (dashboard) of the ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere plug-in.

  5. Select Apply Recommended Settings link.

  6. In the Apply recommended host settings window, select the hosts you want to update to comply with NetApp recommended settings and select Next.

    Note You can expand the ESXi host to see the current values.

  7. In the settings page, select the recommended values as required.

  8. In the summary pane, check the values and select Finish. You can track the progress in the recent task panel.

Set ESXi host values

Using ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere, you can set timeouts and other values on the ESXi hosts to ensure the best performance and successful failover. The values that ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere sets are based on internal NetApp testing.

You can set the following values on an ESXi host:

HBA/CNA Adapter Settings

Sets the recommended HBA timeout settings for NetApp storage systems.

Parameters Set this value to…​

Disk.QFullSampleSize

32 for all configurations. Setting this value helps to prevent I/O errors.

Disk.QFullThreshold

8 for all configurations. Setting this value helps prevent I/O errors.

Emulex FC HBA timeouts

Default value.

QLogic FC HBA timeouts

Default value.

MPIO Settings

MPIO settings define the preferred paths for NetApp storage systems. They determine which of the available paths are optimized (as opposed to non-optimized paths that traverse the interconnect cable) and set the preferred path to one of those paths.

In high-performance environments, or when you are testing performance with a single LUN datastore, consider changing the load balance setting of the round-robin (VMW_PSP_RR) path selection policy (PSP) from the default IOPS setting of 1000 to a value of 1.

NFS settings

Parameter

Set this value to…​

Net.TcpipHeapSize

32

Net.TcpipHeapMax

1024MB

NFS.MaxVolumes

256

NFS41.MaxVolumes

256

NFS.MaxQueueDepth

128 or higher

NFS.HeartbeatMaxFailures

10

NFS.HeartbeatFrequency

12

NFS.HeartbeatTimeout

5