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pdavies123Flag for Canada

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W2K8 VMware host & hardware interrupts

Good afternoon,

I have a problem with one of our VMware servers which is of course causing problems with the vmware guests. The server is a quad core system, and all 4 cores are constantly under pressure from Hardware Interrupts. It ranges from 20%-30% utilization per core, and is really hurting vmware guest performance.

I haven't been able to find any help via searches so I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction. Here is what I have found out so far:

1. It is not a vmware guest that is causing the issue, as it persists even with the guests turned off
2. I can pinpoint when it started within a 6 hour window via cpu usage logs, but looking at event logs for that time frame shows nothing done
3. No drivers have been updated, windows update has not been run, nothing has visually changed with the hardware, drivers, or os patches
4. The server is reporting that all hardware is functioning correctly.

I am using Sysinternals Process Explorer to monitor the hardware interrupts and DPC's, the DPC's are minimal but as stated above hardware interrupts are utilizing between 20% and 30% of each core, 24 hours a day.

How can I track down what is causing this? I have checked all the usual stuff for abnormalities and found none.....system information (hardware conflicts), problems with hardware in device manager, over-utilization of any resources, DMA settings on drive devices, etc and got nowhere.

Rebooting this server is a major deal, and I have been trying to avoid it. Thanks in advance for any help.
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Wonko_the_Sane
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Wow! Not only was XPERF exactly the kind of tool I was looking for to deal with these situations, but the example problem on the link you provided was the *exact* same problem. iLO was causing my issue, the exact same .sys file that was causing issues in the example.

Looks like this is solved for now, and xperf is a great tool to keep in mind for the future. Thanks!
You may have to update the ILo driver... On my servers the problem returned after a couple of days or so. After I updated to the newest version I haven't seen it since.

Yeah, XPERF is a really neat tool.