PVS Accelerator: How to Check PVS-Accelerator Cache Status?

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Article ID: CTX220761

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Description

This article describes the method to check and monitor XenServer PVS-Accelerator status.

Instructions

After completing the PVS-Accelerator configuration, you can view the list of VMs with PVS Cache from the XenServer PVS tab.
The caching status for the VM will be displayed on the tab after starting a VM with PVS Cache, as the following picture shows.
User-added image

The following table lists the status messages displayed on the tab.

PVS-Accelerator status
PVS-Accelerator status	Description
Initialized	PVS-Accelerator has been started and is ready to cache. If the cache remains in this state when the VM has been booted, it means that the PVS Server IP addresses have not been configured correctly, or the VM is not communicating with the PVS server using its primary network interface.
Caching	PVS-Accelerator is working.
Stopped	PVS-Accelerator is not running for the VM. The cache remains in this state when the VM is not running, or when the cache is not configured sufficiently.
Incompatible Write Cache Mode	There is no caching if the vDisk write cache mode is set to “Cache on Server, persistent” or vDisk is in “Private Image” Access mode. Ensure the VM type is "Production" and the vDisk is in "Standard Image" Access mode.
Incompatible Protocol Version	The PVS Server version is incorrect. Ensure that you are using Provisioning Services 7.13 or higher.

You can also get detailed insight of host-level PVS-Accelerator cache operation using the metrics below:

PVS-Accelerator metrics
Metric Name	Description	Condition	XenCenter Name
pvsaccelerator_evicted	Bytes per second evicted from the cache	PVSAccelerator Enabled	PVS-Accelerator eviction rate
pvsaccelerator_read_hits	Reads per second served from the cache	PVSAccelerator Enabled	PVS-Accelerator hit rate
pvsaccelerator_read_misses	Reads per second that could not be served from the cache	PVSAccelerator Enabled	PVS-Accelerator miss rate
pvsaccelerator_traffic_client_sent	Bytes per second sent by cached PVS clients	PVSAccelerator Enabled	PVS-Accelerator observed network traffic from clients
pvsaccelerator_traffic_server_sent	Bytes per second sent by cached PVS servers	PVSAccelerator Enabled	PVS-Accelerator observed network traffic from servers
pvsaccelerator_read_total	Reads per second observed by the cache	PVSAccelerator Enabled	PVS-Accelerator observed read rate
pvsaccelerator_traffic_proxy_saved	Bytes per second sent by PVS-Accelerator instead of the PVS server	PVSAccelerator Enabled	PVS-Accelerator saved network traffic
pvsaccelerator_space_utilization	Percentage of space used by PVS-Accelerator on this host, compared to the total size of the cache storage	PVSAccelerator Enabled	PVS-Accelerator space utilization

With these metrics, you can customize PVS-Accelerator performance graphs from XenCenter on the host-level Performance tab:

On the Performance tab, click Actions and then New Graph. The New Graph dialog box will be displayed.
In the Name field, enter a name for the graph.
Get all available PVS-Accelerator Datasources by inputting “pvs” in search box. From the list of Datasources, select the check boxes for the datasources you want to include in the graph.