Omnistack Virtual Controller

[Hemilton]

I want to ask you a little question. Why does OVC use high memory? I couldn't find any relevant documents. I need detailed information. What exactly does OVC do?

[DaveOb]

 The OVC is the brains behind everything you see in virtual center that is Simplivity related in essence the OVC is Simplivity.

It is the amalgamation of software and hardware to provide a stroage solution that gives compression  in line -deduplication near instantanious backup restores and performance.

At a high end the OVC is a linux based virtual machine that has either a  hardware or more recently a software  Accelerator card, and a raid controller to control the front drives of the server.These drives are then used to create a proprietary filesystem that is presented to an ESXi as an NFS filesystem but in reality it is much more.

Add a second node to the cluster and the OVC begin talking to each other and the data becomes synced between the two to ensure high availability,

Add another cluster and you now have the ability to send backups between clusters.

The memory utaliziation is high because it does alot,think everything your traditional enterprise level  SAN or NFS storage  does  and then add some 

Without the OVC there is no Simplivity its just an ESXi with a small local disk.

[Hemilton]

Why does OVC use high memory? Is there a detailed explanation for this?

[gustenar]

Hello @Hemilton ,

In our Simplivity 3.7.10 Release Notes you can find this information:

OMNI-24710: Virtual Machine Memory Usage alarm appears incorrectly on Virtual Controller in vCenter Server 6.5
In a vCenter Server 6.5 environment, the Virtual Controller triggers a Virtual Machine Memory Usage alarm and
shows full memory utilization, when in fact this is not the case.
Resolution
This is a vCenter Server issue. ESXi treats all memory as pinned and disables sampling on virtual machines with
passthrough devices. This results in active memory reported at 100%. vCenter Server 6.5 is not aware of this new
behavior, and therefore triggers the alarm.
For the Virtual Controller, you can ignore this alarm.

I think I've seen this condition also in 6.7. 

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-a00080604en_us

Gus.

[DeclanOR]

Hi @Hemilton 

Please see also the following KB article which describes how to workaround those alarms:

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docLocale=en_US&docId=mmr_sf-EN_US000062157&withFrame

Thanks,

DeclanOR  #I am a HPE Employee