Max number of Simultaneously Mouted HotAdd Disks PVSCSI on VSA Proxies

Thanks for your reply Gopinath!

You have been really helpful.
I have also checked vmware release notes of VDDK 7.0.0 and 7.0.1 and no news on when the 64 disks per PVSCSI will be supported.

Regards

this is a known vmware issue when using multiple SCSI adapters on VSA.

HotAdd Transport for VMware (commvault.com), see SCSI Port Number Sequence

When a VSA proxy has 4 SCSI adapters, you must reorder the SCSI port assignments to 0-160, 1-1184, 2-224, 3-256.

scsi0.pciSlotNumber = "160" 

scsi1.pciSlotNumber = "1184" 

scsi2.pciSlotNumber = "224" 

scsi3.pciSlotNumber = "256"

Hope this helps.

Hello,

Can you please confirm if this configuration applies also for AVS?

Currently I have ~40 VMs with 1 X VSA proxy and I want to increase the simultaneously mouted HotAdd Disks.

Maybe an option will be to increase the “No. of readers” from VM groups → Configuration tab?

Thank you in advance,
Nikos

Hi Nikos,

Yes, you can increase the number of readers. Just have to monitor the throughput since the more readers you use, the slower the throughput you may see and longer the backup job may be holding the VM snapshots. it’s a balancing act.

Hope this helps.

Hello everyone, I am just walking by as I am looking for a specific answer, I just noted this post has something to do with my question, so I hope you have the patience to please help me understanding this Commvault new-world to me.

We need to deploy MA severs into our environment, so we have an internal SOP stating how to do so, and it reads we need to create the new VMs, its local drives, and 4 PVSCSI in order to configure the disklib for these MA servers.

My question is why a MA server needs 4 PVSCSI controllers (as per my understanding, the first controller will be capable to manage the first round of disks, including the DiskLib)…, and how about the other 3 PVSCSI controllers required on each MA, what´s the main purpose of that or in what cases those 3 additional controllers are needed?

… lastly just wanted to know whether my question has something to do with the main topic you guys are referring into this post.

Thanks a lot for your time and patience.

Hi JBA_Col,

you are correct. MA does not need additional pvscsi adapter to function. 

additional adapters are for improving backup performance and only if your backup is using hotadd transport (configured in the subclient).

assuming your server has 3 drives (1 OS, 2 data) -- then during backup, the server can mount up to 13 additional vmdk on the main interface.  each additional pvscsi adapter can mount additional 16 vmdk during backup.

Hope this helps.

So much appreciated, have a great day !!.