Add a VM

Parameter

Description

Alias

Enter an alias for the VM.

You can edit the alias after creating the VM.

Description

Enter a description for the VM.

You can specify different description to distinguish VMs with the same name.

Select Host

Select a host for VM deployment.

If you do not select a host, the system automatically place the VM on a host selected based on the criteria of fewest VMs, lowest memory usage, and lowest CPU usage.

OS and Version

Specify the guest OS to install in the VM.

The OS you actually install must be the same as the selected OS in type and version.

CPUs

Specify the number of vCPUs.

The number of vCPUs of a VM cannot exceed the number of the CPUs on the host.

Memory

Specify the memory capacity of the VM. This setting is the memory size of the guest OS.

The maximum memory size available for the VM depends on the physical memory size.

Disk

Specify the disk size.

Parameter

Description

CPU

Specify the number of vCPUs. The number of vCPUs of a VM cannot exceed the number of the CPUs on the host, but the total number of vCPUs of multiple VMs can exceed the number of CPUs on the host.

In the system, a VM is a process in the kernel operating system. The kernel schedules processes based on time slices. When the time slice for a process is used up on a CPU, the process will be suspended, and the CPU is passed to the next process. Therefore, more CPUs assigned to a VM means more CPU time slices available to the VM processes and higher performance of the VM.

CPU Cores

Specify the number of CPU cores. The default value is 1.

The number of CPU cores of a VM cannot exceed that of the host.

Bind Physical CPU

Bind the vCPUs of the VM to physical CPUs of the host. After that, the VM can use only the bound physical CPUs. This parameter helps reduce cache misses during process switchover among multiple CPUs. Although the binding can improve the VM operation efficiency, it affects CPU load balancing in the Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) from the perspective of process scheduling in the entire system.

A vCPU cannot be bound to physical CPUs across NUMA nodes. To ensure successful VM operations (for example, migrate, clone, restore, and export operations) between two hosts, you must make sure the source and destination hosts use the same NUMA architecture. This option is only available after you select a host.

Operating Mode

Select a CPU operating mode. Options include Compatible (default mode) and Straight-Through.

• Compatible—Virtualizes physical CPUs of different models into vCPUs of the same model. This mode shields the difference in physical CPUs from the guest OS. To move the VM between hosts that use different CPU models, select this mode.

• Straight-Through—Enables the guest OS to access the physical CPUs directly. This mode provides higher performance than compatible mode. However, you must make sure the source and destination hosts use the same CPU model.

Addressing Mode

Select an addressing mode that matches the guest OS. Options include 64 bit (default) and 32 bit. You must select 64 bit mode if you are installing a 64-bit OS. If you select 32 bit mode for a VM that uses a 64-bit OS, the VM cannot start after being shut down.

Schedule Priority

Select a priority for the processes on the VM to obtain physical CPU resources during a contention. Options include High, Medium, and Low.

When the physical CPU resources are insufficient, VMs with High, Medium, and Low priorities use CPU time slices in the proportion of 4:2:1. Higher priority assigned to a VM means more physical CPU time slices available to the VM processes and higher performance of the VM.

Reserve

Enter the guaranteed minimum CPU frequency for the VM.

Limit

Specify the maximum clock frequency of the VM, in MHz or GHz. If you leave this parameter empty, the vCPU clock frequency is not limited. The value range for this parameter is 10 MHz to the CPU frequency of the physical host.

I/O Priority

Select an I/O priority for the processes on the VM to read/write the disk. Options include Low, Medium, and High.

When multiple VMs on a host perform disk read and write simultaneously, the VM with higher I/O priority has better performance.

Limit Sharing

Turn on or turn off limit sharing. For example, if you enable limit sharing for a VM that has 4 CPU cores and set the maximum host CPU frequency that a single CPU core of the VM can use to 2 GHz, the maximum host CPU frequency is 8 GHz for both the VM and a single CPU core of the VM.

Online Scale Down

Turn on or turn off online CPU scale-down, which allows online reduction of CPUs. T

Parameter

Description

Memory Size

Specify the maximum memory size of the VM's operating system, in MB or GB. The value range for this parameter is 512 MB to the maximum memory size of the host.

In the system, memory resources are allocated to VMs on an on-demand basis. Therefore, the total size of memory that you specify for all VMs on a host can exceed the physical memory size of the host. However, memory overcommitment is not recommended in actual production environments because redundant memory resources are required if DRS, HA, DPM, affinity, or anti-affinity services are configured.

Specify the memory capacity of the VM. This setting is the memory size of the guest OS. The maximum memory size available for the VM depends on the physical memory size.

Reserve

Specify the memory to be reserved for the VM to the maximum memory of the VM in percentage. 0 indicates that no memory is reserved. When the load of the VM increases and all the reserved memory has been used, the VM can retain the reserved memory even if it is idle.

The host allocates memory to VMs based on the actual memory usage of the VMs.

You can reserve some memory for a VM in case the VM needs more memory after the host memory is exhausted.

Limit

Enter the maximum host memory capacity that the VM can use.

Resource Priority

Specify the priority that the VM has when it requests memory. Options include Low (the default), Medium, and High. When the VM requests more memory than its reserved memory, the host makes its memory allocation decision based on the resource priority if memory contention occurs.

Ballooning

To dynamically distribute memory among VMs without shutting down the VMs when memory contention occurs, turn on this option.

HugePages

Enable or disable the VM to use HugePages memory of the host. You can turn on this option only if the HugePages feature is enabled on the host and the VM is shut down. In addition, this feature is mutually exclusive with memory reservation, memory limit, resource priority, and ballooning.

Parameter

Description

Network

Select a vSwitch for the VM. A vSwitch is a software-based IP forwarding and control module. All traffic between VMs and the external network is forwarded through vSwitches.

Port Profile

Specify network parameters for the VM, including its VLAN, ACL, network bandwidth.

Virtual Firewall

Select a virtual firewall for the VM. The incoming and outgoing data packets of the VM will be filtered based on the firewall rules.

NIC Type

Select a NIC type for the VM. Options include Common NIC, High-Speed NIC, Intel e1000 NIC, and SR-IOV Straight-Through NIC. The default NIC type is high-speed NIC.

• Common NIC—Provides a transmission rate of 100 Mbps.

• Intel e1000 NIC—Provides a transmission rate of 1000 Mbps.

• High-Speed NIC—Provides a transmission rate of 10000 Mbps. High-speed NICs are driven by CVK.

• SR-IOV Straight-Through NIC—VMs use vNICs virtualized from physical NICs. SR-IOV straight-through NICs provide the best performance but require the support of the physical NIC and VMs. This option is available only after you select a host for the VM.

Driver Type

Select the driver type for the SR-IOV straight-through NIC, which can only be VFIO. This option is available only if the NIC type is SR-IOV straight-through.

VLAN ID

Sets the VLAN ID of the VM. This option is available only if the NIC type is SR-IOV straight-through.

Bound IPv4 Address

Specify the IP address bound to the MAC address of the VM.

For the NIC to communicate correctly, you must make sure the IP address assigned to the NIC is the same as the bound IP address.

MAC

Manually specify a MAC address. If you leave the field empty, the system automatically assigns a MAC address to the VM.

Fast Forwarding

Enable fast forwarding to improve the network performance of the VM. This feature is available only for high-speed NICs.

Hot Swappable

Enable or disable NIC hot swapping. This option is available only for high-speed NICs.

MTU

Specify the maximum transmission unit of the NIC, in bytes. The default is 1500. This option is available only for common, high-speed, and Intel e1000 NICs

Parameter

Description

Disk

Specify the disk size.

Type

Specify the storage service type of the disk, which can be file or block storage. Options for file storage include New File or Existing File. By default, a new file is created as the disk for the VM. Disk type options are available only if a host is selected when you create the VM. If no host is selected, the value for this option can only be New File.

• Block Device—A block device is also called a raw device, which does not have a file system, for example, a storage LUN on an IP SAN or FC SAN. Block devices are typically used in a virtualization environment that requires high performance, databases and high-performance I/O compute.

• New File—A file is presented to a VM as a disk and is easier to manage than a block device. If you select this option, an empty file is created as the disk for the VM.

• Existing File—If you select this option, specify an existing storage file that is not used by other VMs as the disk of the VM.

Storage Pool

Select the storage pool on which the new disk is created.

File Name

Enter the file name of the disk if a new file is used as the disk. Select a disk formatting mode, which can be High Speed and Intelligent (the default).

• High Speed—The disk is in raw format. The raw format provides high I/O efficiency but does not support snapshots or fast clone.

• Intelligent—The disk is in qcow2 format.

Provisioning

Select a volume provisioning mode. Options include Thin (the default), Lazy Zeroed, and Eager Zeroed.

• Thin—Allocates only as much storage space as the volume requires for its initial operations when the volume is created. If the volume requires more storage space later, you can allocate as much storage space as the volume requires as long as the maximum storage size is not exceeded. This mode provides the lowest performance because it has a high metadata I/O cost.

• Lazy Zeroed—Allocates the specified maximum storage size to the volume when the volume is created. Data remaining on the physical device is not erased during creation, but is zeroed out on first write from the VM. This mode provides a low performance and causes write amplification problems. The minimum data management unit of the file system is 1 MB. If only 4 KB data is written, the remaining 1020 KB data will be cleared, which results in a high cost.

• Eager Zeroed—Allocates the specified maximum storage size to the volume when the volume is created. Data remaining on the physical device is zeroed out during creation. It might take a longer time to create volumes in this mode than to create volumes in other modes. This mode provides the highest performance but it does not allocate resources on demand, which wastes resources in virtualization scenarios.

Bus Type

Select a bus type. Options include IDE, USB, High-Speed (the default), and High-Speed SCSI.

• IDE—Applicable to IDE devices, such as CD-ROM drives. This bus type provides a low performance.

• USB—Applicable to USB peripherals.

• High-Speed—Provides the highest performance and is most commonly used.

• High-Speed SCSI—Provides a low system occupancy and a high transmission rate. To process special or frequent SCSI instructions, select this type.

Cache Mode

Select a data caching mode for the VM. Options include Directsync (the default), Writethrough, Writeback, and None. Different caching modes provide different read/write performance.

• Directsync—Data is written to the physical disk and then synchronized to the disk file of the VM, which improves data security but reduces efficiency. If the VM uses local disks, select this mode to ensure data security.

• Writethrough—Data is read from the host cache and written to the host cache and then to the physical disk. This mode provides the lowest write performance but the highest data security.

• Writeback—Data is written to the VM cache, then to the host cache, and finally to the physical disk. A write operation is completed as soon as the data is written to the host cache. This mode provides the highest efficiency but the lowest data security.

• None—Data is written to the VM cache and then to the physical disk. This mode provides the highest overall performance in security and performance.

Hot Swappable

Enable or disable disk hot swapping. This option is available only for the high-speed bus type.

Parameter

Description

Floppy

Select a floppy drive image. The system will automatically load the high-speed driver compatible with the selected operating system version.

CD-ROM

Select a CD-ROM drive image.

You can select an ISO image file for installing the operating system on the VM.

Connection Mode

Select a connection mode. Options include CD/DVD and Image File (the default).

Hardware

Parameter

Description

GPU Device

Resource Pool

Select a resource pool, which contains all available GPUs in the cluster.

Service Template

Select a service template. The service template defines the priorities for VMs to access the resources (such as GPU and HBA). The host allocates the resources to VMs based on the priorities of the VMs if the resources are insufficient.

Driver Type

Set the GPU driver type. Only the VFIO driver is supported.

USB Device

Connection Mode

Set the USB connection standard. Options include USB 1.0, USB 2.0, and USB 3.0 (the default).

This option is available only if you select a host when you create the VM.

Remote USB

Connection Mode

Set the network USB connection standard. Options include USB 1.0, USB 2.0, and USB 3.0 (the default).

This option is available only if you select a host when you create the VM.

PCI Device

Driver Type

Set the PCI device driver type. Options include KVM and VFIO (the default).

This option is available only if you select a host when you create the VM.

Watchdog

Add a watchdog to the VM. Interrupt options include Reboot (the default), Power Off, and Migrate.