Hi,
Linux see twice the amount of CPUs for a host with SMT/hyperthreading enabled. Inspecting
the individual cores presented to the operating system using mpstat shows that the guests
are running primarily on the “physical cores”, which is expected as the system is SMT
aware. The “hyperthreaded cores” are showing guest activity when the host cpu is heavily
loaded. Using the traditional tools such as top and vmstat does not take hyperthreading
into consideration when calculating the total cpu% usage, again, as expected.
How is the hypervisor host CPU utilization metrics in Ovirt calculated when a hypervisor
host has SMT/hyperthreading enabled? Does Ovirt calculate in the same manner as the
traditional vmstat/top/etc Linux tools, or does it only count CPU usage on the “physical
cores” on the hypervisor? Does it read CPU metrics from the Intel PCM
(
https://github.com/opcm/pcm <
https://github.com/opcm/pcm>) ?
Does the “Count Threads as Cores” setting affect how the host hypervisor CPU utilization
metrics are calculated?
The reason for asking is when using tools for capacity and utilization reporting to
attempt to establish cluster growth and to anticipate when and how much hypervisor
capacity to add, we need the input utilization data to be a correct representation of what
is happening at the hypervisor host.
Thanks.
Regards,
Siggi