This section explains the steps to disable the discovery of VMs manually.

In some deployments, many VM objects present in a vCenter initiate a constant churn of updates increasing high CPU and disk utilization. It may cause scalability/sizing issues. The discovery of VMs can be disabled manually using the CLI and the UI option available under the cloud configuration for VMware. The disable_vm_discovery field is introduced as part of the vCenter configuration object, which refers to Cloud. The field is a boolean type that has a value false by default. This feature is used when there is a requirement to avoid spinning more SEs due to high load and resource constraints. The disable_vm_discovery command is available under the cloud configuration option.

Using Disabling VM Discovery Options

You can configure the VM discovery operation in a vCenter cloud by modifying(toggle) this field. By default, it is false, which ensures all the VMs information is present in the inventory datastore. Toggling it to true results in only SE VMs getting stored in the datastore , and other VMs will not be stored during the inventory discovery process. If this field is set to true, the following features will not be available in the Controller:

  • Selecting pool servers by network in Pool configuration using NSX Advanced Load Balancer UI

  • Retrieval of server VM statistic for the servers configured in the pool

  • Server autoscaling

Once the value of disable_vm_discovery is set to false, all the VM’s will be rediscovered and stored in the datastore.