How to increase memory/cpu of a Hosted Engine RHEV VM

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.3
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.4
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.5
  • Hosted Engine deployment

Issue

  • RHEV Hosted Engine deployment is in use and now you need to increase the memory allocated to the VM.
  • How do I increase the memory of the Hosted Engine VM?
  • How can I increase the cpu cores of the Hosted Engine VM?

Resolution

NOTE: For RHEV 3.6.0 to 3.6.4, please click here. For RHEV 3.6.5 and later, it is possible to modify the Hosted Engine VM configuration directly from the Admin Portal.

In order to increase the memory allocation or the cpu cores of the hosted engine VM, the VM must be brought down and the vm.conf configuration file must be edited on every hypervisor:

  1. Set global maintenance mode from the hypervisor the VM is currently running on:

    # hosted-engine --set-maintenance --mode=global
    
  2. Cleanly shutdown the engine VM:

    # hosted-engine --vm-shutdown
    
  3. Makes sure the VM is Down and not 'Powering Off' before proceeding:

    # hosted-engine --vm-status
    
  4. Edit /etc/ovirt-hosted-engine/vm.conf on each hypervisor, and change these lines to whatever amount of RAM in MB / CPU cores you wish the VM to have (smp = number of virtual cores):

    memSize=4096
    smp=1 
    
  5. Start the VM again:

    # hosted-engine --vm-start
    
  6. And take it out of maintenance mode:

    # hosted-engine --set-maintenance --mode=none
    

IMPORTANT: This modification of vm.conf will need to be performed on any additional HE hypervisors that are added in the future.

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