{{ $t('productDocDetail.updateTime') }}: 2026-01-05

Description

When installing a new business system, you can create a new virtual machine.

Precautions

1. The windows system's disk partitions list includes MBR and GPT. The MBR partition list supports a maximum of 2TB, and the GPT partition list supports a maximum of 128PB.

2. When installing Linux 7, please select the correct time zone and check whether the time is normal. When installing Linux 6, please check UTC and select the correct time zone.
3. When the virtual machine is started, its time base is subject to the node machine, and it is not supported to modify the time base during operation.
4. The number of cores of a single virtual machine does not exceed the number of cores of the node physical node to avoid the competition problem caused by vCPU scheduling.
5. Each virtual machine shall be configured with up to 16 virtual disks, and the single disk shall not exceed 10T. If larger capacity disks are required, it is recommended to configure multiple disks.
6. The CPU node can only be turned on when the virtual machine needs to use a special instruction set (for example, AVX instruction set is required for big data, artificial intelligence, etc.).
7. It is recommended to enable pre-allocated storage space for important virtual machines and enable High Priority. For the recycling mechanism, enable Huge-page Memory.
8. The installation of 64-bit Windows 10 and 2016 using UEFI failed. Instead of entering the installation interface, you enter the UEFI shell interface. You can enter exit in the shell interface and then enter the power on interface. Select continue in the power on interface, and then press any key to start the installation.
9. When creating a new virtual machine, the configured operating system type must be consistent with the actual installed operating system type. Otherwise, the vmTools may not be installed.
10. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5). The disk loading order of Linux systems such as 5 is different from aSV virtual machine, which may lead to changes in the virtual machine's disk order, the virtual machine's inability to start or inaccessible disk, etc. You can edit the virtual machine and select the power on disk. The Linux virtual machine is recommended to use UUID to identify the disk instead of SDA, SDB, and other names.
11. The default BIOS setting for Linux virtual machines is SANGFOR_ LINUX_ UEFI. If the system cannot start after importing the virtual machine, enter the UEFI shell interface, try to shut down, and modify the setting to legacy BIOS restart.
12. After the virtual machine is suspended for recovery, the time is still the previous time, which is not synchronized with the current node time, and the time needs to be modified manually.

13. VMs can be mounted with shared virtual disks of external storage. A shared virtual disk can be used by up to 128 VMs at the same time.

Prerequisites

Prepare and upload the operating system image in ISO format to the HCI platform.

Steps

1. Navigate to Compute > New and select Create New VM.

2. Configure the following information.

• Name: Specify a distinguishable name for the virtual machine.

• Group: Specify a group to which this virtual machine belongs.

• Tag: Specify one or more than one tag for the virtual machine.

• HA:  If Migrate  to another node if the node fails is selected, the virtual machine will be recovered onto another node in case the node running the VM fails.

• Datastore: Specifies a datastore to store virtual machines. HA is configurable only when a shared datastore is selected.

• Storage Policy: Specify the number of replication and performances.

• Run Location: The run location specifies which node's CPU and memory resources are used when the virtual machine runs. You can select and specify a host automatically. When the selected storage domain is selected as the run location, or when the selected storage domain is chosen as the run location, it can also be set as the default location.

• OS: Specify an operating system for the virtual machine. The following guest OS is supported: Sangfor, Windows, Linux, Linux distributions, and others. Sangfor operating system is mainly for aCenter software.

• High Priority: Once selected, resources will be preferentially allocated to the virtual machine if overall resources are inadequate.

• High Performance: When selected, it is marked as an important virtual machine by default. It enables huge-page memory, uses Host CPU and Para-virtualized clock, and pre-allocating. When deselecting the High Performance, the above-enabled functions need to be turned off manually.

3. Adjust The Virtual Machine Hardware Configuration

1. Processor: Specify the virtual machine's number of virtual sockets and cores per socket. Once the Cores field is configured, Virtual Sockets and Cores Per Socket fields will automatically fill with optimum values to achieve the best VM performance.

• Total cores = number of virtual slots * number of cores per slot.

• Enable NUMA Scheduler: Once enabled, memory access and VM performance will be enhanced. Navigate to System > Advanced to enable the NUMA scheduler. To project NUMA topology into a virtual machine, ensure that the virtual machine has more than 8 cores and vmTools installed.

• Use CPU from host: Live migration might be affected because of the tight association between the virtual machine and the host CPU.

• Para-virtualized clock: It applies to Windows virtual machines only. It can improve the performance of Windows virtual machines running databases but requires enabling Use CPU from host.

• Enable CPU hot add: Enterprise license is required, and virtual machine vmTools is installed.

• Enable CPU exclusive mode: Once CPU hot-add is enabled, CPU resources can be hot-added manually for the virtual machine.

• Limit CPU clock speed to: Enable to limit the upper limit clock speed used by the virtual machine vCPU. The limit range is 100mhz to 1000ghz. The recommended value will be displayed in the input box when the virtual machine runs for one week.

• Enable CPU reservation: VMs with CPU reservation enabled will preferentially get CPU resources when they need them, effectively enhancing their performance during periods of high load. However idle CPU resources of these VMs can also be used by other VMs. 80% of node CPU cores are reserved by default. You can go to System > Cluster Settings to set CPU reservation ratios.

• vCPU Model: Supports selecting core2duo or Haswell, a new instruction set added in HCI 6.10.0 to meet the business needs of users, such as installing the operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and higher, or using the application K8s. You can go to System > Advanced > Default CPU Model to select the default instruction set for the cluster to be used by newly created VMs.

1. Memory: The virtual machine's memory allocation does not exceed a single node's memory.

• Enable huge-page memory: Turning on huge-page memory for a specific application can improve the virtual machine's performance, but turning on this option will lead to memory pre-allocation of the virtual machine. After enabling huge-page memory, the memory recovery mechanism of the virtual machine will be turned off, prioritizing memory use and improving business performance.

• Enable memory hot add: Once memory hot-add is enabled, memory resources can be hot added manually for the virtual machine.

2. Disk: Virtual machine disk allocation, including the following four allocation methods.

New disk

• Dynamic provisioning: Allocate space based on pre-allocated space and actual demands to enhance disk performance and utilization. The maximum capacity is 8T.

• Thin Provisioning: Allocate space based on actual data size as needed, saving space with a maximum capacity of 63T.

• Pre-allocating: Pre-allocate a fixed amount of space, enhancing disk performance but wasting more storage space., with a maximum capacity of 4T.

• Disk IO limit: This value indicates the upper limit of disk IO that the virtual machine can occupy, configurable read/write speed, and read/write times limit. The maximum read/write speed limit range is 128KB/s-102400mb/s, and the maximum read/write times range is 16 to 2147483647. The recommended value will be displayed in the input box when the virtual machine runs for one week.

• Support Virtio: It helps to improve Disk IO performance, but some versions do not support this feature. Do not change the default unless necessary, which may cause the disk to be missing when installing the system. It is recommended not to change the default setting.

• Space Reclamation: If this option is selected, the occupied storage space will be released immediately when a file is deleted from the disk. This option does not apply to Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) disks. In addition, this option can be enabled only when the operating system supports the discard function. The following table lists the test results on different operating systems, indicating that the discard function is supported by Windows Server 2012/Windows 8 and later and Linux kernel 4.18 and later.

• Advanced setting:  Stripe Width: refers to the number of stripes that can be read or written simultaneously. This number is equal to the number of physical hard disks used by a virtual machine simultaneously. This is to set the stripe number of a single disk of a single virtual machine. It is recommended to use the default setting.

After cluster initialization, the striping function is enabled by default. To ensure optimal  I/O  performance, the default stripe width will not exceed the number of data disks on any physical node in the virtual datastore. When upgrading from version 5.8.6 or below to version 5.8.6 or above, the virtual machine created before upgrading does not have the striping function by default. If you need to use the striping function, you need to clone one of the virtual machines created before upgrading and using the cloned virtual machine.

Existing disk

Use the disk image file of the virtual machine created earlier, such as the qcow2 format file.

Physical Disk

Mount the physical disk directly to the virtual machine to use.

Shared Disk

Select the existing shared disk, which is generally used to deploy Oracle RAC and other applications that need the shared disk.

Shared virtual disks of VMs created through the Oracle RAC Wizard must be on the same LUN. Those on different LUNs can be added when editing VMs.

1. CD/DVD: If the Load ISO image file is selected, you need to choose the corresponding ISO image file. You may upload an image file to the datastore from the local disk if there is no ISO image file. Click Upload from this Local Disk, select an ISO image file and upload it.
2. Eth0: Specify the NIC connection location of the virtual machine. In advanced options, you can specify the Adapter model, MAC address, and IP address of the NIC. Of which:

• Adapter model: Virtio by default.

• MAC address: Set the MAC address of the NIC and keep it automatically obtained or manually specified.

• IPv4 setting: Set the IPv4 address of the NIC. Only some operating systems are supported. The supported operating systems can be viewed on the platform page, and the virtual machine can take effect only after the performance vmToolsis installed. After setting, you need to wait one minute before it takes effect.

• IPv6 setting: Set the IPv6 address of the NIC. Only some operating systems are supported. The supported operating systems can be viewed on the platform page, and the virtual machine can take effect only after the performance vmToolsis installed. After setting, you need to wait one minute before it takes effect.

3. For other hardware and advanced configurations, kindly refer to Chapter 5.2.7 Virtual Machine Editing of this manual.

4. After selecting the hardware information, select CD/DVD 1, click Browse, and click Upload from this Local PC.

There are two ways to enter the upload interface, Image File and Datastore.

• Image File: An ISO format image prepared in advance.

• Datastore: The datastore where the image is stored.

5. After selecting the local image and target datastore, click Upload.

6. After uploading, open the virtual machine console to install the system. After the installation, the creation of the virtual machine is completed.