VMware Communities : Thread List - Performance & VMmark

My VMware workstation is very slow!!

pdsouto — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:08:20 GMT

I am running a software called SAP ECC 6.0 through the VMware Workstation and the software is installed in my computer, but the performance is very lousy. Even the mouse arrow moves slowly into the VMs window. My notebook is good, I have an intel processor 2.53hz, 4gb RAM, HD (7200 rpm).
Does anybody know how i can speed this softaware up????

My OS is windows 7 (64), and i am running windows server 2003 in the VM.

Thanks

block level and file level transfer

Jdsony5 — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:55:54 GMT

Hello guys,

whats the difference between file level transfer and
block level transfer? i just know that Fiber Channel SAN and iSCSI use
block level transfer and NAS uses file level but i don't the exact
differences between them. i googled but in vain. i was not happy with
what i got on google. any suggestions please

cheers

Enable trusted execution

aRandomPerson — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:09:43 GMT

I have a Dell Optiplex 755, I updated my BIOS settings to Enabled Trusted Execution, VT enabled and virtualization enabled. Now my machine will boot to a blinking cursor. I am unable to get back to the BIOS? Is there a way to resolve this?

error durring javaserver workload result collection

simonpha — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:16:28 GMT

Hi I've run into this problem with the javaserver workload when completing the workload run. I receive the following error in STAX. It seems to me that the workload completes correctly but when trying to do the result collection it errors out.

20091119-18:55:02 Start JobID: 2, File: C:\vmmark\xml\vmmark_main.xml, Machine: local://local, Function: Main, Args: { 'CONFIGFILE' : r'C:\vmmark\VMMARK.CONFIG' }, JobName: smalltest1
20091119-18:55:02 Info Holding block: main
20091119-18:55:02 Info Received RELEASE BLOCK main request
20091119-18:55:02 Info Releasing block: main
20091119-18:55:13 Start Testcase: VMmark Setup
20091119-18:55:36 Stop Testcase: VMmark Setup, ElapsedTime: 00:00:23
20091119-18:55:36 Start Testcase: VMmark Wkld Setup
20091119-18:57:54 Stop Testcase: VMmark Wkld Setup, ElapsedTime: 00:02:18
20091119-18:57:54 Start Testcase: VMmark Run Tiles
20091119-19:53:24 Stop Testcase: VMmark Run Tiles, ElapsedTime: 00:55:30
20091119-19:53:24 Start Testcase: VMmark Results Collection
20091119-19:53:25 Error STAXPythonEvaluationError signal raised. Terminating job.

===== XML Information =====

File: c:\vmmark\xml\javaserver_functions.xml, Machine: local
Line 322: Error in element type "call".

===== Python Error Information =====

com.ibm.staf.service.stax.STAXPythonEvaluationException:

Python object evaluation failed for:
'Info: COPY FILE C:\javaserver_%u.stdout TOFILE %s%sjavaserver_%u.stdout' % (tileserver, gResultsDir[0], gFsep, tileserver)

Traceback (innermost last):
File "<pyEval string>", line 1, in ?
ValueError: invalid literal for __int__: javaserver0
===== Call Stack for STAX Thread 1 =====

[
function: Main (Line: 106, File: C:\vmmark\xml\vmmark_main.xml, Machine: local://local)
sequence: 16/22 (Line: 128, File: C:\vmmark\xml\vmmark_main.xml, Machine: local://local)
testcase: VMmark Results Collection (Line: 507, File: C:\vmmark\xml\vmmark_main.xml, Machine: local://local)
sequence: 1/2 (Line: 508, File: C:\vmmark\xml\vmmark_main.xml, Machine: local://local)
iterate: 1/5 0 tilelist (Line: 510, File: C:\vmmark\xml\vmmark_main.xml, Machine: local://local)
sequence: 1/1 (Line: 511, File: C:\vmmark\xml\vmmark_main.xml, Machine: local://local)
iterate: 2/6 JavaServer gWORKLOADLIST (Line: 513, File: C:\vmmark\xml\vmmark_main.xml, Machine: local://local)
sequence: 2/2 (Line: 514, File: C:\vmmark\xml\vmmark_main.xml, Machine: local://local)
function: GetResultsJavaServer (Line: 227, File: c:\vmmark\xml\javaserver_functions.xml, Machine: local)
sequence: 8/12 (Line: 234, File: c:\vmmark\xml\javaserver_functions.xml, Machine: local)
]
20091119-19:53:25 Info Terminating block: main
20091119-19:53:25 Stop Testcase: VMmark Results Collection, ElapsedTime: 00:00:01
20091119-19:53:25 Status Testcase: VMmark Run Tiles, Pass: 1, Fail: 0, ElapsedTime: 00:55:30, NumStarts: 1
20091119-19:53:25 Status Testcase: VMmark Setup, Pass: 1, Fail: 0, ElapsedTime: 00:00:23, NumStarts: 1
20091119-19:53:25 Status Testcase: VMmark Wkld Setup, Pass: 1, Fail: 0, ElapsedTime: 00:02:18, NumStarts: 1
20091119-19:53:25 Status Testcase Totals: Tests: 3, Pass: 3, Fail: 0
20091119-19:53:25 Status Job Result: None
20091119-19:53:26 Stop JobID: 2

Anyone have any idea what this may be?

Thanks in advance

Warnings on virtual machine memory usage

walterD — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:16:25 GMT

Hello,
Have a question about the difference between ESX 3.5 and vSphere 4. I have 4 ESX 3.5 and 2 vSphere 4. On the ESX 3.5 the memory usage is clearly lower then on the ESX 4 for the same virtual machine.
Example : SVR2003 TS with average of 20 users configured the same, running the same application.

On the ESX 3.5 : HP Prolaint DL380 G5 with 16 GB memory, dual processors running on 3 GHz (4 logical processors no Hyperthreading)
Memory Granted : 2.134.016 KB Average
Memory Active : 313.342,33 KB Average

On the ESX 4 (vSphere) HP Proliant DL380 G6 with 16 GB memory, Quad processors running on 2,8 GHz (16 logical processors with Hyperthreading)
Memory Granted : 2.097.152 KB Average
Memory Active : 1.987.864,5 KB Average

As you can see there is a big difference in mem usage. We therefore always get alerts and warning from our virtual center whiel I cannot find anything wrong on the config from the virtual servers, as well on the vmware machine.

Does anybody had the same problem, and what can we do about it ..

THX

Walter

Expected vSwitch/vmxnet network performance?

pocomo — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 14:30:06 GMT

Hello -

I'm doing some network debugging using 2 CentOS 5.2 64-bit VMs on ESXi 3.5u3. The VMs each are using 1 "enhanced vmxnet" NIC connected to a "virtual only" vSwitch (no physical NIC for this vSwitch). Everything is running at 1000/Full. All other VMs on the ESX host are powered off.

VM -> VM network testing with iperf, results do not seem good @ 321 mbit/s

<><><><><><><>< IPerf Server ><><><><><><><>

~~root@il-sql etc~~# iperf -w 128k -s

Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 256 KByte (WARNING: requested 128 KByte)
------------------------------------------------------------

<><><><><><><><>< IPerf Client ><><>><><><><><><

~~root@il-migration yum~~# iperf -w 128k -c il-sql -t 30

Client connecting to il-sql, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 256 KByte (WARNING: requested 128 KByte)

3 local 192.168.143.124 port 60048 connected with 192.168.143.127 port 5001
3 0.0-30.0 sec 1.12 GBytes 321 Mbits/sec

<><><>><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><

If I run testing locally on the IPerf server machine using the loopback address, results are excellent:

~~root@il-sql ~~~# iperf -c 127.0.0.1

Client connecting to 127.0.0.1, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 49.4 KByte (default)

3 local 127.0.0.1 port 46768 connected with 127.0.0.1 port 5001
3 0.0-10.0 sec 3.38 GBytes 2.90 Gbits/sec

Anyone have any ideas? I would expect these "pure virtual" networks to run somewhere above 90% of the theoretical max.

Thanks.

How to fetch historical performance of ESx Server using vmware vi sdk

vmcts — Mon, 25 May 2009 06:08:42 GMT

Hi,

Can anyone let me know how can i retrieve the histrical performnace statistics such as CPU, Disk, Network etc of ESX Server. I am able to get the real-time

statistics data of cpu with the following code. I got to know from somewhere we can ignore the maxsample to get the historical statistics , is it true?? or do we need to make any changes in the code ??? Please reply.

// Get Performance Manager

ManagedObjectReference pmRef = _ServiceContent.perfManager;

// Get supported perf counters in the system

PerfCounterInfo] cInfo = (PerfCounterInfo[)getObjectProperty(pmRef, "perfCounter");

// PerfInterval] cInfo = (PerfInterval[)getObjectProperty(pmRef, "historicalInterval");

ArrayList vmCpuCounters = new ArrayList();

int index = 0;

for (int i = 0; i < cInfo.Length; ++i)

{

if ("cpu".Equals(cInfo.nameInfo.key))

{

vmCpuCounters.Add(cInfo);

index++;

}

Hashtable usageCounter = new Hashtable();

while (index > 0)

{

//int index = 0;

for (IEnumerator it = vmCpuCounters.GetEnumerator(); it.MoveNext(); )

{

PerfCounterInfo pcInfo = (PerfCounterInfo)it.Current;

Console.WriteLine(index + " - " + pcInfo.nameInfo.label);

PerfCounterInfo pcInfo1 = (PerfCounterInfo)vmCpuCounters--index;

usageCounter.Add((pcInfo1.key), pcInfo1);

//index--;

}

ManagedObjectReference vmmor = null;

_svcRef = new ManagedObjectReference();

_svcRef.type = "ServiceInstance";

_svcRef.Value = "ServiceInstance";

DateTime curTime = VS.CurrentTime(_svcRef);//"2009-05-10T13:53:12.547162Z"

//DateTime beginTime = curTime.Subtract(new TimeSpan(7, 0, 0));

DateTime NewbeginTime = curTime;//.Add(new TimeSpan(5, 32, 0));

//DateTime endTime = NewbeginTime;

DateTime NewendTime = NewbeginTime.Add(new TimeSpan(0, 5, 0));

ArrayList morlist = GetDecendentMoRefs(null, entityType);

if (morlist != null && morlist.Count > 0)

{

for (int j = 0; j < morlist.Count; j++)

{

//vmmor = (ManagedObjectReference)((object[])morlist[j])[0];

vmmor = (ManagedObjectReference)((object[])morlist[j])[0];

ObjectContent] vmname = GetObjectProperties(vmmor, new string[ { "name" });

PerfMetricId[] aMetrics = VS.QueryAvailablePerfMetric(pmRef, vmmor, NewbeginTime, true, NewendTime, true, 20, true);

//PerfMetricId[] aMetrics = VS.QueryAvailablePerfMetric(pmRef, vmmor, DateTime.MinValue, false, DateTime.MaxValue, false, 20, true);

ArrayList mMetrics = new ArrayList();

if (aMetrics != null)

{

for (int index1 = 0; index1 < aMetrics.Length; index1++)

{

if (usageCounter.ContainsKey(aMetricsindex1.counterId))

{

mMetrics.Add(aMetricsindex1);

}

//PerfMetricId[] metricIds = new PerfMetricId50;

for (int count = 0; count < mMetrics.Count; count++)

{

PerfMetricId] metricIds = (new PerfMetricId[ { (PerfMetricId)mMetricscount });

PerfQuerySpec qSpec = new PerfQuerySpec();

qSpec.endTime = NewendTime;

qSpec.entity = vmmor;

qSpec.maxSample = 1; ( ignore maxsample parameter to get the historical data ???)

qSpec.maxSampleSpecified = true;

qSpec.metricId = metricIds;

qSpec.intervalId = 20;

qSpec.intervalIdSpecified = true;

qSpec.startTime = NewbeginTime;

PerfQuerySpec] qSpecs = new PerfQuerySpec[ { qSpec };

//Boolean continueDataCol = true;

//while (continueDataCol)

//{

PerfEntityMetricBase[] pValues = VS.QueryPerf(pmRef, qSpecs);

if (pValues.Length == 0)

{

Console.WriteLine("Virtual Machine " + vmname[0].propSet[0].val + " is not running" );

}

else

{

for (int i = 0; i < pValues.Length; ++i)

{

PerfMetricSeries[] vals = ((PerfEntityMetric)pValues).value;

PerfSampleInfo[] infos = ((PerfEntityMetric)pValues).sampleInfo;

Console.WriteLine("Sample time range: " + infos.timestamp.TimeOfDay.ToString() + " read every" + infos.interval + " seconds");

//+ " - " + infos http://infos.Length-1.timestamp.TimeOfDay.ToString());

for (int vi = 0; vi < vals.Length; vi++)

{

PerfCounterInfo pci = (PerfCounterInfo)usageCounter[valshttp://vi].id.counterId;

if (pci != null)

Console.WriteLine(pci.nameInfo.label + "-" + pci.unitInfo.summary);

if (valsvi.GetType().Name.Equals("PerfMetricIntSeries"))

{

PerfMetricIntSeries val = (PerfMetricIntSeries)valsvi;

long[] longs = val.value;

for (int k = 0; k < longs.Length; ++k)

{

Console.WriteLine("instance:" + val.id.instance + " value:" + longs[k] + " ");

}

Console.WriteLine();

}

2 vCPUs Hardware Interupts

Wadebum — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:24:08 GMT

We have decided to move our Oracle Forms servers to VMs. We built a 2 vCPU with 4GB of Ram Windows 2003 SP2 VM on a new ESX 3.5 host using its own LUN on a EVA8100. Our DBAs started to do some forms compiling on the VM and noticed that it was taking around 4 times longer on the VM than it does on physical servers. They wanted me to add more CPUs so I added 2 bringing the server up to 4 total. I watched the performance as they reran the forms compiling and noticed that the actual process doing the compiling was only using about 25% of the CPU (my thinking is that the process does not take advantage of multiple cores). I put the server back down to 2 vCPUs and after rerunning the compile it was using about 50% CPU (adding to my suspicion that it does not take advantage of multiple cores).

Since it was a new Oracle install we thought maybe there is something diffrent between the physical server and the VM, so I did a test with a script that gathers all the email addresses in our Active Directory and puts them in a file. I added a function to the script to put a time stamp at the top and bottom of the file so I could compare between the physical and virtual server. The physical server finished the script in around 6.5 min but the virtual server took around 16-17 min to finish the AD script.

Since we were about to upgrade to ESX 4 we decided not to spend much more time figuring this out. Our upgrade to ESX 4 is now complete and I have upgraded the VMware Tools and Hardware of the VM to the latest versions. It still takes around 16-17min to run the AD script.

I then built a brand new VM with 1 vCPU and 1GB of Ram in the same LUN as the origional server and installed Windows 2003 SP2 onto it and installed the VMware tools. After that I ran the AD script 5 times and it finished on average at just under 5 minutes. I then installed all available WIndows Updates and ran the AD script again with no significant time increase.

Next I shutdown the VM and added a vCPU. After finding the new hardware I ran the AD script 5 more times with an average around 17min. I watched the server with Process Explorer and the Hardware Interupts are running around 20% the entire time the script is running. I used KernView to see what was going on in the Kernal of Windows and I get processor, ntkrnlpa, hal, tcpip, win32k, e1000325, ndis, afd, fltmgr, and ntfs as the top 10 items.

Using Process Explorer on the Physical Server shows the Hardware Interupts around 2% at the highest.

I have gone so far as to make this the only VM running on an HP BL465 G5 with 2 Quad Core AMD 2.7GHz processors and 32GB of ram and setting up CPU and Memory reservations to what the VM has but it does not perform any better. Does anyone have any idea how to get better performance out of a VM with multiple vCPUs? Or why the Hardware Interrupts are so high?

Performance issue using virtualization

sispeo — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:39:27 GMT

When comparing our software installed in a physical host and in a comparable VM (same CPU, memory), we notice that the product is two times slower when running in a VM (Guest OS is Windows 2003, using an ESXi 4.0 host. Software uses only one CPU)

As we are not in production environnement, we tried with all others VM powered off. We tested our VM with and without CPU reservation (best results with), with and without memory (quite no difference), and with 1, 2 and 4 vCPU

After several tests, it seems that the problem comes from usage of semaphores : when replacing them by critical sections (but we can't replace all), performances are quite the same between the physical host and the VM. All code is executed with similar performances but when using semaphores, the VM consumes CPU longer than the physical host.

Does anyone already eared something about such a problem ? Is there a reason to explain bad performances when using semaphores under Windows hosted by ESXi 4.0 ?

For example, we wrote a simple program to benchmark semaphores under Windows hosted by ESX (in our lab, it took 10sec on a physical host and 22sec in a VM) :

#include "stdafx.h"

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
unsigned __int64 nCount;
DWORD nTickCount = ::GetTickCount();
HANDLE hSemaphoreBridgets = CreateSemaphore(NULL, 1, 1, NULL);

for (nCount = 0; nCount < 10000000; ++nCount)
{
WaitForSingleObject(hSemaphoreBridgets, INFINITE);
ReleaseSemaphore(hSemaphoreBridgets, 1, NULL);
}
printf("Duration %d s\r\n", (::GetTickCount() - nTickCount) / 1000);
CloseHandle(hSemaphoreBridgets);

return 0;
}

Tool to measure VMware performance or VMmark

sudiady — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 08:09:29 GMT

Anyone know any tool to measure a VMware VI3/vSphere setup similar to VMmark?

Thks in advance

SCSI errors on VMs on NFS datastores

deltajoka — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:17:22 GMT

Hi,

We have recently been experiencing some problems with our VMs on NFS datastores on a IBM N series/NetApp filer. We have about 5 to 10 short incidents per month where VMs (simultaneously on multiple ESX hosts) are experiencing some kind of scsi "lag"/timeout. The following types of messages are then logged on the console (and in the kern.log) during these "glitches":

mptscsih: ioc0: attempting task abort! (sc=de2e0280)
mptbase: ioc0: IOCStatus(0x004b): SCSI IOC Terminated
mptscsih: ioc0: task abort: SUCCESS (sc=de2e0280)
mptbase: ioc0: IOCStatus(0x0002): Busy
mptbase: ioc0: IOCStatus(0x0002): Busy

Usually, some (sometimes only one host, sometimes several, even though VMs on all hosts are affected) of the ESX hosts are logging single occurrances of the following type of nfs-related errors:

esx03 vmkernel: 118:20:41:44.851 cpu1:1110)WARNING: NFS: 4590: Can't find call with serial number -2146566064
esx04 kernel: nfs_statfs64: statfs error = 5
esx01 kernel: nfs_statfs: statfs error = 5

We have been investigating counters on the switches and on the filer. There seem to be some retransmitting of tcp packets occurring, but no dropped packages or packages with bad headers/invalid checksums or similar.

If these problems would be the result of high IO or latency on the filer, wouldn't the effect be slower transfers rather than VMs simply "losing" their disks for a short period of time?

The ESX hosts are HP DL360 G5, running ESX 3.5u4. The switches are Cisco 2960 (gigabit), with flow control disabled.

Any input on this matter is most welcomed!

Understanding the VMmark Results

eMax04 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:32:53 GMT

Hello all!

I have successfully ran a full VMmark benchmark test and am looking to get some more information about the results, and how to improve them.

The Numbers generated are very vague and the doc I have doesnt say much about how the numbers are calculated. I am looking for some type of calculation that VMmark uses to get the end results. I assume it is somthing like IOPS/total transactions ......etc....

I have a single quad core CPU server with 16 GB of Ram. I am using a back end SAN and am looking to really test the back end SAN vs any of the other components of this.

If anyone has any tips they would be appreciated!!

Thank you in advance!!

Warning: RMI exception trying to contact client0:1098.

eMax04 — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:22:05 GMT

Hello All,

Getting an error when running the webserver and java server test... this seems to be related to communicating with the client machine, but I dont understand how it is not working if the client is initiating the command.

This is the end of the webserver log:

2009-11-11 22:52:15:825 RemoteLoadGen: Warning: RMI exception trying to contact client0:1098. Retrying...
2009-11-11 22:52:16:839 RemoteLoadGen: ERROR Unable to contact client0:1098
2009-11-11 22:52:16:839 SpecwebControl: ERROR Client(s) not responding. Aborting test.
2009-11-11 22:52:17:932 RemoteLoadGen: ERROR Remote exception setting server reset data collection from client0:1098
java.rmi.ConnectException: Connection refused to host: 172.24.243.17; nested exception is:
java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect
2009-11-11 22:52:17:932 SpecwebControl: Stopping remote clients...
2009-11-11 22:52:17:932 RemoteLoadGen: 30-second client ramp-down starting...
2009-11-11 22:52:17:948 RemoteLoadGen: stopping client client0:1098
2009-11-11 22:52:18:931 RemoteLoadGen: ERROR Remote exception stopping clients from client0:1098
java.rmi.ConnectException: Connection refused to host: 172.24.243.17; nested exception is:
java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect
2009-11-11 22:52:18:931 SpecwebControl: Waiting for remote clients to stop...
2009-11-11 22:52:20:133 RemoteLoadGen: ERROR Remote exception waiting for clients to complete from client0:1098
java.rmi.ConnectException: Connection refused to host: 172.24.243.17; nested exception is:
java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect
2009-11-11 22:52:20:133 SpecwebControl: ERROR runWorkload() failed!
2009-11-11 22:52:20:133 SpecwebControl: ERROR runTests() failed!
2009-11-11 22:52:20:133 SpecwebControl: ERROR Benchmark run failed!
2009-11-11 22:52:20:149 SpecwebControl: Terminating run. Please wait...

ANY HELP IS APPRECIATED!!!

I need to support an ancient application

mick-au — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:55:57 GMT

I hope that I have posted this in the correct forum, if not please let me know.

I support an ancient application that uses software timing loops - true yes and not my choice at all. It needs to run on P166 or similar. Anything faster including the old box in the shed is too fast.

Is there a way to host a server that runs in a vm and the vm will not go faster than a P166? I am aware of cpufreq so a possibility is vm hosting a Linux distro which hosts a slow server running multidos. My friends business depends on this so $ is possible. I have been trying to pursuade them to pay me to move their busapp into the century of the fruitbat but to no avail.

Can anyone point me in the right direction please?

Mick

High Ready Times?

mealan — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:24:37 GMT

This we thought was very funny when someone was complaining about poor performance, the other 4 4cpu vm's that are all pegged also show a slow down, I hope this makes you giggle.

ESX slow boot at Loading VMKernal IPfc-7.40 (Options")

RohitGoel — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:35:41 GMT

Hi Team,

We have connected our ESX 3.5 Update 4 with HP storage through FC. We have Emulex LPe 1105 HBA.
When we present the LUN to the ESX server , server slows at loading VMKErnal Ipfc 7.40 screen for long time.
As troubleshooting we have tried rebooting the servers with FC disconnected ,once it comes fine , connecting back the FC and do the rescan through Vmware client but it never able to detect the LUN sucesfully. Just wondering if this is some know issue ans any workaround\solution is there?
Any suggestions will be appreciated. Could it be a firmware HBA firmware or storage firmware issue or it could any patch update requirements on ESX servers ? Really don't understand where to start with troubleshooting...

Regards,
Rohit

Disk throughput rates on ESX 3.5 and VSphere

Androsbg — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:22:02 GMT

Dear colleagues,

I'd like to start a discussion on a very important and general topic - the disk throughput rate on any of the ESX versions. The reason to do that is a design I'm working on including implementation of virtual file servers. What I bumped into during the test phase was very poor performance. What we tested - copying 1GB file from the virtual machine disks, and issueing time dd command with block size 1024 and count 1000000 from the console of the ESX. There are the results:

ESX 4 on BL460 – 20MB/s
SAN attached, 40MB/s local SAS disk. (SAN attachedis EVA)

ESX 4 on BL685c G5 –
15MB/s SAN attached, 20MB/s local SAS disks

From Virtual machine –
copying files on VMFS - 10MB/s

ESX 3.5 on BL685c G6 –
30MB/s on SAN and 20MB/s on local disks (SAN attached is Clariion)

ESX 4 on BL685c G6 –
30MB/s on SAN, 20MB/s on local SAS disks

From the virtual
machine copying 1GB file on VMFS datastore – about
25MB/s

From the virtual
machine copying 1GB file on RAW device – about
25MB/s

The numbers are not any
different when using LSI, BUS logic or Paravirtual bus. They also didn’t change
when the queue length extended to 128.

ESX 3.5 running on Dell
T300 test lab – about 25MB/s on local and iSCSI disks

I installed a clean Win
2003 enterprise server on a blade BL685c G6 on it’s local disks. Then presented
a disk from the same array and tested the performance – it was close to 500MB/s
…

I now start to wonder - is this typical for the ESX ? I've done many implementations so far but always with a dedicated VM team and never received complains. This time however I planned for file, application and DB servers on Virtual.. And now it seems like not such a good idea.

I would appreciate if you share some thoughts and maybe execute similar tests in your environments and paste the results here.

Thank you in advance

VCB Configuration Problem

mokarrom — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:16:46 GMT

Dear all Boss,

i am facing some problem to configuring VCB .........Please help me............

my system and action details follows........

38 VM

4
ESX 3.5 and 8 LUN each lun 800GB

1 VC 2.5 with VI Client 2.5

1 Proxy (Windows 2003 Standard Edition
SP1) with 1.5 TB D drive with one HBA

Install VCB v1.1

Then….

diskpart to execute auto mount disable

and auto mount scrub

SSL disable

1. Loginto the backup proxy .

2. change directory to D:\VMware\VMware Consolidated Backup Framework
directory.

3. Used vcbVmName tool to enumerate
virtual machine identiﬁers. At the command prompt,

*vcbVmName <IPornameofVirtualCenter> -u <username> -p
<password> -sipaddr:<IPaddressofvirtual machinetobackup>*

4. From the results of running the*vcbVmName tool*, select which identiﬁer
to use (*moref, name, uuid, or ipaddr*)
in the vcbMounter command.

5. At the command prompt,

VcbMounter -h
<IPornameofVirtualCenter> -u <username> -p <password> -a ipaddr:<IPaddress
of virtual machine to backup> -t fullvm -r <VCBproxy backup directory>

After this command I the output is
following ……………

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

D:\VMware\VMware Consolidated
Backup Framework>*vcbmounter -h 10.20.X.25
-u vcb -p 12345678 -r F:\ -a ipaddr:10.20.Y.40 -t fullvm -L 6*

[2009-11-11 20:50:13.937 'App' 916
info] Current working directory: D:\VMware\VMware Consolidated Backup Framework

[2009-11-11 20:50:13.937
'BaseLibs' 916 info] HOSTINFO: Seeing Intel CPU, numCoresPerCPU 1
numThreadsPerCore 2.

[2009-11-11 20:50:13.937
'BaseLibs' 916 info] HOSTINFO: This machine has 2 physical CPUS, 2 total cores,
and 4 logical CPUs.

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.281
'vcbMounter' 916 info] Connecting to host 10.20.7.25 on port 443 using protocol
https

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.281
'vcbMounter' 916 trivia] Initializing SSL context

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.281 'BaseLibs'
916 info] Using system libcrypto, version 90709F

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.296 'App' 916
info] Vmacore::InitSSL: doVersionCheck = true, handshakeTimeoutUs = 120000000

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.296 'SOAP'
916 trivia] Sending soap request to ~~TCP:10.20.X.25:443~~: retrieveContent

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.312
'BaseLibs' 916 warning] SSLVerifyCertAgainstSystemStore: Subject mismatch:
VMware vs 10.20.X.25

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.312
'BaseLibs' 916 warning] SSLVerifyCertAgainstSystemStore: The remote host
certificate has these problems:

The host name used for the

connection does not match the subject name on the host certificate

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.312
'BaseLibs' 916 warning] SSLVerifyIsEnabled: failed to read registry value.
Assuming verification is disabled. LastError = 0

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.312
'BaseLibs' 916 warning] SSLVerifyCertAgainstSystemStore: Certificate
verification is disabled, so connection will proceed des

pite the error

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.515 'SOAP'
916 trivia] Received soap response from ~~TCP:10.20.X.25:443~~: retrieveContent

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.515
'vcbMounter' 916 info] Connected using API Namespace
vim25.

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.515
'vcbMounter' 916 info] Authenticating user vcb

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.515 'SOAP'
916 trivia] Sending soap request to ~~TCP:10.20.X.25:443~~: login

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.531 'SOAP'
916 trivia] Received soap response from ~~TCP:10.20.X.25:443~~: login

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.531
'vcbMounter' 916 info] Logged in!

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.546
'vcbMounter' 916 info] Performing SearchIndex find.

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.546 'SOAP'
916 trivia] Sending soap request to ~~TCP:10.20.X.25:443~~: retrieveContent

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.546 'SOAP'
916 trivia] Received soap response from ~~TCP:10.20.X.25:443~~: retrieveContent

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.546 'SOAP'
916 trivia] Sending soap request to ~~TCP:10.20.X.25:443~~: findByIp

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.546 'SOAP'
916 trivia] Received soap response from ~~TCP:10.20.X.25:443~~: findByIp

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.546
'vcbMounter' 916 info] Got VM
MoRef

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.546
'vcbMounter' 916 info] Got access method

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.546
'vcbMounter' 916 info] Got coordinator object

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.546
'vcbMounter' 916 info] Attempting data access.

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.562
'vcbMounter' 916 error] Error: F:: Is not a writeable directory.

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.562
'vcbMounter' 916 error] An error occurred, cleaning up...

[2009-11-11 20:50:14.562 'SOAP'
916 trivia] Sending soap request to ~~TCP:10.20.X.25:443~~: logout

D:\VMware\VMware Consolidated
Backup Framework>pause

Press any key to continue . . .

N.B. I am using “Sybex Mastering
VI” and “vcb_partner_integration_guide.pdf”
and “vi3 backup guide.pdf”.

*Please Help me
Step by Step procedure or any correction…………..*

thanks
mcseiu

Limit any single process to 25% of cpu

killr — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:53:08 GMT

I had a run away process of an application on a VM yesterday on a blade server that took up 100% of the cpu process. The blade had 25 users on the server and no one else could do anything else while this was running. Locked up the VM for everyone else until this process finished.
Does anyone know how to Limit any single process to not use any more than 25% of cpu at a time?

Thanks
Killr

2 ESX shows Red

mokarrom — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:20:37 GMT

Dear all

i have 4 esx server (total 64 processor/187Ghz 192 GB ram ).
38 VM Run on this
from some days my VI client shows two ESX Red.
current failover capacity 1 hosts (but it was 3 hosts)
configured failover capacity 1 hosts
fully automated
admission control: Don`t allow constraint violations
VI client screen shot attached in this.
My fqdn is 12 chars
VC already restarted by admin.

pls help about this issue.......

thanks

mcseiu

Configuration of Hitachi AMS 2100 SAN Storage to VMWare ESX 3.5 with best performance

MehulParmar — Sat, 16 May 2009 18:27:12 GMT

We have setup of AMS 2100 Hitachi SAN Stroage consist of SATA 2 HDD with VMWare ESX 3.5 and below is the configuration

1. 1 TB of LUN with lose LUN concept at the storage side. (1 TB LUN = 250 GB x 4 LUN)

2. Two controller with 2 port on each so total 4 port from 2 controller.

2. Visible to ESX via FC Brocade switch. each port support 4 GBPS data transfer.

The problem we are facing is

1. If we run 40-50 machines on ESX Server till that time, storage is performing well. But once we acceed the limit of 50 there is a drastic performance degrade for each VM image running on storage and if we will go and check the storage the write pending rate is more then expected.

Please can anyone let me know what could be the best practice to use Hitachi AMS 2100 storage with VMWare. It will be much appriciated.

Thanks.

Very slow startup HP 6730b notebook

RB85 — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:47:36 GMT

Hi,

I have been using VMware for a couple of weeks now to test the possibilities for the company i work for. I am using a HP 6730b notebook with a Intel Core2 Duo @ 2.26GHz and 4GB RAM. I have used VMware Workstation 6.5 to create some virtual machines and VMware Player to use them later. All this went well and the performance was good for the first weeks, but since a couple of days the performance got really bad. The virtual machines all run on Windows XP Professional with SP2 installed. When i try to start it, it can take up to 15 minutes for the machine to startup. Loading the personal settings takes forever. I have tried to run different virtual machines, but all have the same problem so i guess its a problem with the laptop, but i am not sure about that. Did anyone of you have some problem or something like this and have any idea how i can solve it?

Thanks in advance

with kind regards,

Roger

Is there a VMark Dependancy check?

eMax04 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:39:09 GMT

I am building out a VMmark environment with ESX 4.0 and I wanted to know if there is a way I can run through a Dependancy check from the client machine without executing a FULL benchmark test.

I have gone through 2 different tests with it failing at different times due to some minor confiugration errors. Parts of the test take a LONG time and I am trying to just see if i can run somthing that will check all dependancies without issuing the full benchmark commands.

Your help is appreciated thanks!!!!!

Guest in Vm instance

vmmar — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:56:55 GMT

Hi ,

i have Vmware ESX server and in vmclient infracture and there multiple instances running . if right click on any instance , i see shutdown guest and restart guest. What is that guest? shutdown a instance with guest and shutdown with linux command are same?

can pls clear this out

Thanks

VM object in perfmon not listed?

AllBlack — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:09:24 GMT

Hi,

We are running vsphere and I cannot seem to add the VM object in perfmon, it is not listed
Anything I am overlooking? Yes, tools are installed

Please consider marking my answer as "helpful" or "correct"

SPECweb Wont install on Webserver Template

eMax04 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:12:43 GMT

I just got the SPEC web CD. I have the Webserve template running and when i try to load setup.jar it fails and says it cannot open the file.

I installed the latest version of Java on the machine and when I double click setup.jar it loads the splash screen, i select a language and then the progress bar goes to 75% and then hangs for ever.

Any ideas??? Did i miss a step when configuring the template?

any help is appreciated!

VMmark Client - Exchange Connectivity Errors

eMax04 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:15:38 GMT

Hello Vmware community!! Your help is much appreciated!

I am configuring a VMmark environment and have an issue with the client connectivity.

Currently it is a single tile environment with a single client machine.

When running Load Sim I am getting these errors:

"0x8004011d] (The attempt to log on to the Microsoft Exchange Server computer has failed.)
Nov 02 22:54:11: Iuaasempaa (MAILSERVER0-61): ERROR: Logon failed: Error: MAPI_E_FAILONEPROVIDER 0x8004011d
Nov 02 22:54:11: Iuaasempaa (MAILSERVER0-61): Recreating profile...
Nov 02 22:54:11: Creating new profile "Iuaasempaa"...
Nov 02 22:54:11: Iuaase2baa (MAILSERVER0-7): ERROR: Open store "Public Folders": Error: MAPI_E_FAILONEPROVIDER 0x8004011d (The attempt to log on to the Microsoft Exchange Server computer has failed.)
Nov 02 22:54:11: Iuaase2baa (MAILSERVER0-7): ERROR: Logon failed: Error: MAPI_E_FAILONEPROVIDER 0x8004011d
Nov 02 22:54:11: Iuaase2baa (MAILSERVER0-7): Recreating profile...
Nov 02 22:54:11: Creating new profile "Iuaase2baa"..."

This error goes on for every single profile. however it seems like in the exchange server I can see a folder under users that says "Loadsim" and has a ton of users in it.

I am far from an exchange guru so I dont know what is going on.

If anyone can provide assistance It would be greatly appreciated.

THANKS!

Virtual Desktop Performance issues - ESX 3.5 VM View

ciberweb — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:26:43 GMT

Sorry, wasn't sure what category to submit this under.

I have a small environment running 1 VM server and 5 VM Desktops. Performance on the Desktop side is the issue.

Server Hardware:
1 - Dell 2950 / 2-Quad 2.8ghz Proc / 16gb RAM / 1.2TB of local storage - 15k RPM HD's / 2 - Dual NIC's (1 NIC = 2 VM Desktops, 1 NIC = 3 VM Desktops and 2 NIC = Server)

Software:
Server -> SBS 2008
PC's -> Windows XP Pro SP3 - Office 2003, ERP Application, File Maker, Adobe and WinZip

Virtual Hardware:
1 2.8ghz Proc / 1gb RAM / 25gb C:\ drive (15gb free)

Physical Hardware used for Virtual PC's:
Dell Dimension 2400 -> 2.4ghz Single Proc, 512mb or 768mb RAM, 100mb NIC

Issues:
VM users are seeing slowness issues when attaching documents to emails in Outlook.
Refresh is slow when changing from one email to another.
Working in one application and then toggling to another hangs the desktop for a bit.
Generally speaking applications seem to be slow.

What is my bottleneck? Is this typical or is there a config change that can be made to resolve the issues?

Help would be greatly appreciated.

Marc

creating vm pc's?

KNardi — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:28:37 GMT

VSphere 4.0, VCenter 4.0, ESX hosts = 9 all using HA and DRS on one Cluster

My question is, Is it possible to deploy a PC workstation using LANdesk on the VIC?

Can we use a PXE boot?

Password and Username for the downloadable VM's

tom howarth — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:40:10 GMT

does anybody know what is the root password for the Linux servers that are downloadable from the VMmark site> I am using the 1.1.1 versions of the guests.

If you found this or any other answer useful please consider the use of the Helpful or correct buttons to award points

Tom Howarth VCP / vExpert
VMware Communities User Moderator
Blog: www.planetvm.net
Contributing author on "VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment”. Currently available on roughcuts

IOMeter testing within the Service Console

sames — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 02:21:50 GMT

I have started working with IOMeter to measure and tune disk performance on ESX 3.5. I can run IOMeter from within a guest operating system but I can't seem to figure out how to run it from the service console. My intent is to load IOMeter in the service console to test VMFS disk performance for both DAS and iSCSI storage. I tried running Dynamo in the console but failed with this error:

./dynamo: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Is there a way to install IOMeter in the console or must I use a guest OS to acomplish this?

Thanks,

Steve

Disk performance strangeness (Guest OS slow, ESX storage blazing fast)

oschistad — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:06:08 GMT

After going through a series of IOmeter tests at a customer site I am left scratching my head. The customer originally contacted us to help figuring out why their storage system was delivering such bad performance, but we were quickly able to determine that the problem was higher up in the stack somewhere.

In our tests we saw that cleanly installed windows guests were able to deliver the expected performance - up to 400MB/s for sequential loads, and 10.000+ IO/s for random tests.

However, when running the same benchmark inside an existing windows VM (we tried both Win 2003 and Win XP guest) we were seeing just awful results - 60-70MB/s for sequential, and 300IOps for random. During this test we also saw that the reported latencies as seen from inside the guest were reaching into the hundreds - even for the sequential load. However, esxtop run on the ESX hosting these VMs reported response times in the single-digit order, so clearly the problem was not that we were in any way saturating the infrastructure.

Since we figured that this could be a driver and / or OS setting issue we then proceeded to change the SCSI device type for the OS disk which we were using for testing from lsilogic to buslogic. Lo and behold, now we were seeing the same excellent speeds as with our clean VMs.

So my first question would then be this: Does anyone know of a plausible reason why an old windows install has such huge problems generating disk IO when simply replacing the controller type fixes the problem? Going from lsilogic to buslogic and vice versa should only have negligible impact, and not the 10-15X improvement we are seeing.

Now for the second part of the issue: The customer in question also runs a large amount of Linux guests (CentOS/RedHat 5.X) and we saw the same results when testing these. Unfortunately we were not able to demonstrate any "good" test runs; even a cleanly installed CentOs 5.3 had more or less the same performance as their existing VMs, and it was frankly lousy. We also tried a completely different linux distribution just to eliminate that particular kernel/library combination as the culprit, but with no change.

When testing the Linux guests, as with their old Windows guests, we were seeing a huge discrepancy between reported latencies from the guest, and what esxtop was telling us. Clearly this is relevant, and I am hoping that someone has an explanation and possible fix for this.

As a final FYI we did try using the divider=10 to reduce the interrupt rate of the Linux VMs but this did not have any measurable impact.

AMD Opteron 2435 2.60 GHz Six Core VS Quad Core AMD Opteron(tm) 8384; 2.7GHz

fanzalone — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:31:57 GMT

Dear All,

I'm new in the vmware community.

I'm using vmware Enterprise 3.5 since 3 years.

I need to change two of my vmware hosts and I would like to know which benchmark score this two different machines have.

both machine are dual socket equiped.

Thanks a lot for your help.

Memory Reporting: who do I trust - vCenter or Windows PerfMon?

jthomas71 — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:26:55 GMT

Background: We are running a Proof of Concept with some new hardware and VMware. We are currently running a few VMs (4GB memory per VM) of Windows2003 terminal servers hosting some applications. We use ESXi4.0 bare metal running on an IBM HS22 blade (2 x Nehalem CPUs and 28GB RAM.) We are trying to find the sweet spot for how much memory we should use per VM to help forcast how many VMs we will be able to handle per blade. We currently have about 30 users per VM terminal server.

BTW: We patched with the latest ESX patch to fix the memory reporting error we were getting with the Nehalem processors.

My question: When we check our memory usage, Windows PerfMon shows it is using approximately 90% physical memory (and this is the data our load balancing software uses) when we have ~30 users. If we look at the vSphere client, it is reporting that VM is only using approximately 30% Active memory. Who do I trust? Why doesn't the vSphere client show that 90% perfmon statistic anywhere in the memory traces? What happens when windows hits 100% physical memory usage - will vSphere client still show less than 50% active memory? What will happen with Windows Server at that point?

TiA

What VMware product to use? Your dream setup high-powered personal workstation...

EricBryant — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:20:47 GMT

Hello All,

If you want to run multiple guest O/S's for your personal workstation, and want the absolute highest possible desktop performance ever (including graphics performance) and you had a big beefy host with plenty of CPU & RAM to put it on, would you run vSphere, ESXi, or Workstation 7 on it (all cost considerations aside) and if you chose Workstation, what base O/S would you use assuming you want maximum RAM available to guests?

Thanks!

Eric

VM suddenly running VERY slow

mattstewartcsd — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:31:20 GMT

Hi, I am running Virtual Servers on an ESX 4.0 host. The host has plenty of grunt and all servers are running ok,....apart from one. All of a sudden I can no longer RDP to to (although I can see it on the network and ping it). I can logon the the server using the console but it takes an age to do so and sits on the 'applying computer settings' window for minutes at a time. The server is Win 2K3 R2 x86 with 2 vProcessors, 4gb RAM, and plenty of disk space. It was running fine a few days ago.

Any ideas what can casue this?

vSphere vcpu scheduling imbalance

ltbraswell — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:16:11 GMT

My group has been doing some testing comparing virtual to bare-metal performance with a particularly high-compute utilizing application.

Platform: Intel E5540 (Nehalem) quad-core, dual-socket. 48GB of 1066MHz memory (properly balanced)

OS/guest OS: RHEL 4.7 (for both bare-metal and virtual configs)
Configuration: Hyper-threading off for both esx and bare-metal. Numa enabled and verified on both ESX and RHEL 4.7 (bare-metal)
ESX version: 4.0u0 build 164009
ESX host power.CpuPolicy is set to "static"

The application is a single-threaded modeling/simulation type program. It is not I/O intensive at all and basically each job generates a load average contribution of 1 (i.e. it pegs a cpu for each job). What we have been doing is running 1,2,4, and 8 simultaneous jobs and comparing the virtual to bare-metal physical performance with different combinations of VM vcpu counts (1,2,4 vcpu). Don't know a lot of details about the application other than when scaling from 1 to 8 jobs on bare-metal, the performance of any one job degrades somewhat so it seems to be memory constrained (not sure if the is sensitive to last level cache size or raw RAM performance). The "model" size itself for each job is 1.5GB.

The observation is that when simultaneously running 2 and 4 of these applications, each in its own 2vcpu virtual (so 2 and 4 virtuals respectively but all running on one 2-socket physical). More often that not for the 2 job case, we will see the worlds representing these active vcpus both running on 1 socket (with the other socket basically idle). For the 4 job case (though not as frequently), we have seen the load split 3/1 across the 2 sockets. When we run 8 jobs we get an even distribution of active vcpu worlds across the 2 sockets (4 on each).

The question is: Why is it that when there are 2 active vcpus does ESX schedule these vcpus on one socket more often than not. Same thing for 4 active vcpus, lopsided scheduling 3/1, though not as frequently. The hypothesis is that this behavior is related to some power management function of the scheduler (i.e. it would rather load up one socket more fully so that the cores on the other socket have a chance to be freq scaled down or in the halted state and therefore save power).

Ordinarily for an application that is not sensitive to memory performance or last level cache size this might not be an issue but for our application it apparently is sensitive the load being spread across sockets.

We can workaround this lopsided scheduling by using affinity rules to pin virtuals to sockets and manually force the load to be spread but we were hoping for some way to get it to balance the load without using affinity rules. Note that our hosts are running with power.CpuPolicy static.

Any ideas?

Message was edited by: ltbraswell changed subject to remove the reference to version 4

ESXi 4.0 shows incorrect memory usage at host level

dasbacgl — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:33:56 GMT

Hey,

I've installed the Nehlem patch on my ESXi 4.0 boxes (current build #193498). The individual guest VM's now report their Active memory correctly, and Memory Usage is also correct, however at the host level it now appears that ESX is reporting Memory Usage (%) based on Consumed memory instead of Active Memory.

Has anyone else encountered this?

Thanks,

Garrick

When to add additional memory to VM?

killr — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:40:20 GMT

How does one tell when to add more memory to a virtual. I am quite new to vm and don't understand all of the settings. I am getting some alarms set off, but I don't see any ballooning. Can someone explain or direct me to a doc that explains what all of the settings are Active,Granted,Consumed & Balloon are or how to tell when to give the VM more memory

Thanks

Found a patch that is keeping the memory in check.

Thanks for everyones help on this!!

Killr

Performance

nellore — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:02:58 GMT

HI,

I installed ESX3.5i and created 2VM's , booting of the VM's are very slow

1. HP blade 8.GBRam, 2.6CPU assigned 3.5GB for VM still it is taking 16min's to boot to window's
configured with windows2003 with SP2,Etrust antivirus,with updates and windows latest Update

2. When ever we take base Server Restart NTP service is getting Down.

3. I am facing in VM's Network problem using Netbios copy it is taking around 14mins has taken 64mb file

Kindly let me know Anyone has faced this issue.

Anyone familiar with STPNavigator tool

sujsada — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:22:07 GMT

Can anyone help to analyze data for storage performance using STPNavigator?

Windows 2008R2 Terminal server - very bad performance

develco — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:39:36 GMT

Hi,

We have been trying Windows 2008 R2 x64 Terminal server as virtual machines, but so far we have experienced very lousy performance.

We have a single host. An IBM 3655 with 2x Opteron dual-core and 24GB RAM and VSphere ESXi.

On the single host we run 2 2008 Terminal Service and 1 2008 File server. Both terminal services got lousy performance.

The CPU utilization is very high - at 100% with just 5-10 users.

We have tried change the number of vCPU's - from 1 --> 2 --> 4 - neither helped.

I have read about changing the HAL, when you change the number og vCPU - but I can only find info on Windows 2003 - do you need to change anything on 2008?

But what could cause the performance problems?

Best regards

Kim

Keyboard and Screens slow to respond

killr — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:17:05 GMT

We have an esxi40 server and we have created a vm that runs windows 2003 os with applications running on it. We have people that use terminal server to get to it. We have it setup for 1 cpu and 2gig of memory. Seems like when we get around 20 users connected, as the day progresses, we will have maybe one or two people call and tell us that when the open notepad or excel and try to type somthing, they are getting slow responses and when they try to open a tab that they have mininized, it is slow to respond.

Question is: I am not receiving any alarms due to this on monitoring although it seems to me to be a memory issue.

Your comments please.

Thanks,

Killr

Capacity Question

vmArch — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:19:10 GMT

How do I figure out how many VMs I can load on a server based off of how many CPUs and how much memory I have on that server, manually. By manually I mean I do not have time to get VMmark or Capacity planner at my job so I need to manually figure this out. I also would like to figure out how much capacity I have left over if I already have VMs loaded on a server, manually.

Monitoring Memory Usage

killr — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:46:15 GMT

We are testing EXSi 4 and have p2v a vm. We set the vm to 2gig memory, but still seem to run into slowness and keyboard slows down etc. Haven't been able to figure out how to monitor the memory as it shows the full 2gig I gave it. There is no balloning that I see, so my question is how do you actually know if you need to give it more memory or not without having some kind of monitoring setup?

Any help will be helpful,

Thanks,

Killr

I beleive we have some know how now.

Thanks alot for everyones help.

Killer

Hi Guys.. my VMware get conrinuous reboot

kurva1979 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:37:38 GMT

Hi Friends,

I am using vmware workstation and installed solaris 10, every thing look good for 1 month and later it get loop reboop( it get reboot continuour at GRUB options after 10 seconds) you can find the attachment .. pls can any one help me how to resolve this issue.. as it is very important for me pls guys.. help me to come out from this issue.. tks in Advance...

opinions on the 10gb network cards

cxo — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:19:49 GMT

Would like to know people's opinions on the 10gb network cards. In particular the "Intel 10 Gigabit AF DA Dual Port Server Adapter" and the "Chelsio Communications S320E: 10 Gbe Nework Adapter".
Just looking for horror stories.

San Sizing documentation request...

eggie — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 03:06:02 GMT

This was posted a couple years back but it seems a proper response was never given. Is there any industry documentation available concerning san sizing/planning.

"3. SAN sizing - VMware states a range that no more than 32 VMs per LUN
if they are highly utilized then spans to 100 VMs per LUN if the VMs
are not highly utilized. This is a very large range. When sizing for
performance, VMware needs to provide the info to back up the above,
that includes what the LUN's RAID level was, LUN size, disk count per
the LUN, disk speed, proc I/O maximum, etc so we know why this is being
stated. Example, I have a SAN with 1.3TB space - why can't I stripe,
say 28 disks as RAID 10 and have 1 large LUN to host 100 heavily
utilized servers? What if the LUN was striped with RAID 4? Simple
guideline(s) that address LUN sizing based on spindle count based on
RAID levels to assess proper sizing for performance for x number of VMs
shouldn't be too much to ask for."

Thanks in advance.

vmware server performance benchmarks...

eggie — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:52:27 GMT

Hello - I am looking for independent studies showing benchmarks/performance of vmware products on different hardware platforms (dell, ibm, hp, etc.). I have only been able to find studies produced by the vendor (ie. ibm, hp, etc.) and am seeking something more objective.

Thank you.

I keep getting an error message "Error Caused by File"

kevinadavis — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 08:27:47 GMT

I am brand new to the virtual world and just recently installed blade servers and VMWare. I am running VSphere 4.0. I created my first VM Template and when I try and create a new VM from that template I get an error message "Error Caused by File" and the VM creation terminates. I created a 600 GB volume on my SAN to place the VMs I create so space should not be an issues since I only have my virtual center VM currently in that volume. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thank You!

Kevin

Resource Pools

Mr G Grant — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:11:55 GMT

We are currently hosting 417 virtual machines on a cluster containing 11 servers. Should i be looking at creating resource pools now as some machines are performing at bit worse now.

Any advise is much appreciated.

A Newbie needs help in a big way....HELP!!!

Dinube — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:19:50 GMT

Aloha:

I just installed VMware-Fusion-2.0.6-196839.dmg on My MacBook Pro running OS 10.5.8. It seems to work well.

However I am having problems installing a Hanger 9 simulator. It's on 4 separate disks. The first disk goes on ok asked for disk 2, but does not eject disk one.

I get an error panel which is attached.

Any ideas??

Thanks
Dan Page

VA deployment degradation on vSphere4

Lexus16 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:08:21 GMT

Hello,

We have high performance degradation when our Appliance is deployed to ESX server via Virtual Center. When the appliance is deployed to ESX directly we don’t have such problem.
We are using the following script:

curl -u username:NfelMC2Ub -k -T upload https://10.250.148.27/folder/LR1_11133_ESXAppliance/upload.dat?dcPath=Center&dsName=Storage1

where 10.250.148.27 is the address of Virtual Center. If we specify the address of ESX instead of Virtual Center, everything works fast.
BTW such problem appeared on vSphere 4, on previous versions everything was fine.
Could you please answer:

What could be the reason of this degradation?
How can we tune up the speed of deployment via Virtual Center?
If we have correct credentials on Virtual Center, is it possible to deploy directly to the ESX registered on it?

Thank you

IRQ interrrupts

JohnBons — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:16:42 GMT

From reading kb1003710 (1003710) i was running true the config of one of our host's.
The vector 0x71: this IRQ 16 is shared with VMK vmnic6,VMK qla4022, VMK vmnic1
right?

vmred.nl

Recommanded VM instances in 1 esx host 3.0 and 3.5

sean051 — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:15:31 GMT

Anyone knows what is the recommandation VM instances each esx host should have in a cluster of 2 esx 3.0?

Many Thanks

Listing hosts from a failed VM ESX 3.5 server crash

Just_Bob — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:34:16 GMT

Had a VM server crash the other day in our cluster. All of the hosts migrated to other servers with no issues. Is there a way that we could tell what host were on the server at the time it crashed? Would make life easier for our operations unit.B-)

Slow Network for 1000/Full Host, Fast Network for Guests?

NateRice — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:44:44 GMT

So we have just implemented our first ESX 3.5 machine to give it some testing. We spent the last 3 days trying to figure out why the gigabit connected ethernet only operated around 50mb/s of sustained through put. We ran a battery of tests. Changed NICs, patched, even wiped everything and reinstalled from scratch.

Well after screwing around with this for the longest time we noticed that if we started more than one transfer we could peak the connection to this host machine right at 100mb/s. This was really odd considering the best we could do on a per-transfer basis was just half of that. What we decided was happening was some kind of bandwidth throttling within ESX its self. When we finally figured this out we decided to copy a VM guest to the server and see if the guests were also throttled.

Well it turns out that they too are throttled at around 1/3 to 1/4 of the full 1000mb network speed though they are signifcantly faster. This is a huge hassle for us considering we installed the GB network specifically to shuffle around very large virtual machines.

My question is why on earth is the host throttled? Where is this configured? Why are the guests throttled and where is this configured?

Thanks for your time.

Degradation when snapshots are deleted?

jedijeff — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:11:20 GMT

I heard from someone very familiar with ESX, that as soon as you put a snapshot in place for the first time on a guest, that even after it is deleted your VM can still have some performance degradation. This is due to the fact that once a snapshot is done, there are still some "lingering" effects after it is deleted. Can someone confirm this, or clarify a bit for me please?

Performance issue when deleting snapshot

chrisAMS — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:52:38 GMT

Hi,

I used a tool to replicate my servers from one site to another. The problem is it happened often that the snapshot is huge say 10-20Go. So when the delete process begins, the ESX becomes slow

and sometimes completely unaivailable. I would like to know if there is a way to increase performance by for instance adding memory, or if there is a way to limit resources when comiting a snapshot

to this specific task so the delay will increase but keep good performances on the ESX.

Thanks a lot for your help

ESX 3.5 VM Perfomance Charting

vmproteau — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:53:45 GMT

ESX 3.5 (build 163429) Virtual Center 2.5 (build 147633)

In our environment, we have a predominance of WIndows servers. When asked for VM performance data, we typically recommend the client perfom OS level performance monitoring for detailed information. There are an increasing amount of requests where Virtual Center metrics and performance charts suffice and I see us getting more requests to provide this level of perfomance data and charting.

When charting in Virtual Center, I notice that realtime data has more metric options than day, week, month, year and custom. Particularly in disk, outside of real-time, I only have a disk usage metric.

First, is what I descrie what I should expect to see?
Is there a configuration option (or detail option) I can set to allow those metrics to be chartable in the other time frames?
If there is, is it wise to make that change (will it have potential negative effects)?

Any information about performance charting for VMs withing Virtual Center would be helpful.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV/Windows Server 2008 performance problems

ITbauerspirits — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:37:14 GMT

Hello everbody!

We have some performance problems with our ERP-System since we virtualised it and we can't figure out, how to solve it.

Our host hardware:

Fujitsu Siemens PRIMERGY RX300 S3
8 logical CPUs
12 GB RAM

The host has the latest ESX build installed. We also use a SAN were the virtual machines are stored on.

For the NAV we made a virtual machine with Windows Server 2008 SP2 x64 (4 CPUs) with 12 GB RAM and SQL Server 2008 x64. It is the only vm on the host. Then we backed up the old database from the old NAV-Server, recovered it on the new server and made an upgrade to NAV 5.0 SP1. We actually thought, that the performance would get better, but now everything takes longer than before.

We tried everything we could think of, like locking pages configuration for the sql processes, changing the network packet size to 8 KB and the number of vCPUs, but nothing helped. Do you know anything else we could do to accelerate our VM?

We also have some performance problems with the Windows Server 2008 in generell. When we try to add a new role with the Server Manager it takes ages until it's done. Has anybody else the some problems with Windows Server 2008?

Thanks

ESX SAN Sizing (HA, VMotion)

kuay5 — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 04:53:23 GMT

Hi All,

We have 5 ESX (vpshere) servers, each of them are connect to a SAN, all of them have been assigned 2 LUNs each (170GB and 480GB), all can see each other's LUN for vmotion/HA. This was the configuration recommended by our vendor. The purpose of 170/480 was that 170 is used for storing C drives, and 480 for D drives. The vendor says its more of performance, because the OS will write to another LUN.

Now we have purchased 3 more ESXs, and this time their storage requirements are much larger.

My question is, do we still have to stick to the 170/480 theory? I will probably need something like 170/800.. I can't think of any possible pitfalls because even if its vmotion, its just the VMs booting up from another host in the cluster.. the only thing is that i can't move the VMs to another LUN if its smaller..

Centos 5 VM 100% CPU usage

godpickny — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:15:44 GMT

Hi, I've installed ESXi at a few sites still getting a feel for ESXi. Its been a God send in large part, but I'm having some serious issues with CPU usage. At first I configured a Centos VM with a single cpu. This VM is running server software for about 30 clients, evrything was fine. But then I noticed that the server started moving slow, a check with system monitor showed the cpu at 100% usage. A reboot and things would be running fine again until a couple hours later when the same result occurs...100% cpu usage.

Even at nights when no one is logged on the cpu is still 100%. Adding a second cpu only helps slightly, but after a few days both cpus are at 100% usage. Is there something I missed in the config or something else I need to do. This same configuration Centos5 running on a stand alone pc works perfectly but once its virtualized these issues arise.

I'm running ESXi on IBM Server with quad zeon, 6GB RAM, RAID5

Centos5.2 VM configured with 3GB RAM and 2 vCPUs

I've seache the net for answers but none that applies to Centos can someone help me?

reinstalling after time machine back up

phydaux — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:16:56 GMT

Hi there,

I'm about to replace the hard drive in my mac book, I plan to reinstall everything
from time machine.

Has anybody done this? are there any special issues with VMware or XP, will all my XP
data be OK or should I reinstall it separately?

Thanks in advance.

PS I’m running Mac 10.5.8 VM ware
2.00 Windows XP.

Is ESX a lot better than vmware server in performance??

stevemebius — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:04:42 GMT

Hi all,

I am running an vmware server 2.0.1 on host centos 5.3 on server class machines.

I will run one single application in different guests; guests would be a mix of windows xp and centos.

The appl is probably 90% cpu intensive and 10% data intensive. The appl will be invoked over and over again. Each invoke currently probably run half hour to one hour depending how big the data set I assigned it to.

I am running 2 to 4 vm's per host at the moment.

Different guests share data from the host. The host exports data to guests thru NFS/Samba to Linux/Windows guests respectively.

Do you think if switching to other higher-end vmware products (e.g., like ESX, ESXi, etc), I will gain something in performance?

If it does not worth it, I would rather spend the $$ in the hardware way of speed up.

Thanks.

Steve

IBM LS22 server and Windows 2008 Terminal Server CPU Maxing Issue

Nemus — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:31:33 GMT

I am running VM4 Sphere with a guest OS of Windows 2008 Terminal server on an IBM LS22 with 16 gigs of ram and 2 cpu's after the fith person logs in to the Win 2008 Terminal Server the cpu hits 100% on the virtual machine.

My assuption is that its an issue with Windows 2008 TS ,but thought I would do a post here to see if anyone could shed some light on the issue.

The system runs to a crawl after this happens and I haven't been able to run any other virutal machines.

This server is Runing VM V4 sphere

I've been runing V 3 with out an issue, but the new Sphere V4 seems to be buggy.

Any suggestions about what could be causing this issue would be helpful.

So to recap my questions are:

Is this a vmware issue or just an Guest OS issue?

If it is a vmware issue what could be causing the guest OS to spike to 100% on both cpus?

Thank You

Memory balooning & performance

IrNico — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:32:10 GMT

I've the following questions about memory balooning:

When I understand it well, memory balooning is to make memory free. How fast is this balooning (MB/second......)?
In general, will end users with an online application get a poor performance for quite a while (during the balooning operation)?
How intelligent is ESX & balooning? Does free memory of a VM which is quite idle so there are little performance consequences for this VM?

Thanks

10G Network Performance - max 1.6Gb/s

johnhaas — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:43:52 GMT

Hosts: ESX 3.5u4; multiple brands of 4 socket, 24 core servers, 128G of RAM, 2x10G adapters (Intel, Broadcom and Server Engines).

Network: cisco 5010

Test client: rhel5u2x32

Test methodology: using an nfs mount, cat /mount/nfsfile > /dev/null. The file is 4G of text and is 100% cached.

We are unable to drive the network to more than 1.6Gb/s.

If we use 10 clients, each client evenly splits split up the 1.6Gb/s.

On later tests, we used clients on multiple vSwitchs, to multiple NICs, to multiple 10G storage controllers, and still only get 1.6Gb/s.

Has anyone actually pushed a 10G adapter? If so, how?

Giving CPU Reservation to VM DRASTICALLY Improves Performance

tfskelly — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:37:30 GMT

Hello,

I've got a new, underutilized, HP bladesystem/ESX3.5 cluster. Each host only holds, at most 5-6 VMs. Each host has dual quad-core processors and 32GB RAM. So I was somewhat supprised to see slow performance on some of my VMs. I gave one of the poor performers a 250mhz cpu reservation and immediately the VM settled down. It went from being pegged at 100% utilization(in VC) to idling quietly.

I was under the impression that, if CPUs are not in contention, reservations don't do anything. These CPUs should not be in much, if any, contention. The VMs are all 1 or 2 vcpu and ,under normal operation paramaters, aren't resource hogs. Setting a minor (100-250mhz) cpu reservation also helped on a few other VMs. Check out the attached pictures for cpu usage detail.

Can anyone explain why giving a VM a token cpu reservation would have such a dramatic impact?

Thanks,

Kelly

ESX Network configuration samples

espi3030 — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:16:18 GMT

Hello all,

Currently I have 14 ESX hosts, divided into 3 clusters. 6 in cluster A, 6 in cluster B, and 2 in cluster C, they are SunBlades 6250. They currently have 2 on board NIC's, I am waiting for 14 4 port replacement NIC cards which will bring my blade NIC totals to 6 each. Right now I have one physical nic for my VM network, and the second NIC for the Service Console and VMotion. Can any one make some recommendations as to the best setup with only 2 NIC's until I get my additional 4?

Should I use 1 physical NIC for VMotion on its own virtual switch and the other NIC for my VM networks on a separate switch? Or should I combine both physical NIC's on one virtual switch and have VMotion, Service Console and VM traffic on one virtual switch? What is my best setup with only 2 NIC's, and what will be my best setup once I get my additional 4 NIC's?

If anyone can post here .jpg's of their network setup so I can compare to mine. Thank you

How to check total Ram in the ESX host

kiranbkiran — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:22:14 GMT

What is the command used to check the total RAM available and other Harware details info in the ESX 3.5 host from console

Kiran

Cas Latancy and Vmmware VMs

chinthaka — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 07:05:16 GMT

HI,

I am going to purchese memory for my Mobo.I would like to know CAS latancy of memory realy importent to run Vertual machincs ?

Mobo:- GA-Ep35-DS3P

Memory :- http://www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/configurator_new/PartsInfo.asp?root=&LinkBack=&ktcpartno=KVR800D2N6K2/4G

regards

Horrible performance after long inactivity

jkounis — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:48:47 GMT

I am running a Windows XP (32-bit) guest on an Ubuntu 9.04 (64-bit) host using VMPlayer 2.5.3. Performance was marginal until I set "sched.mem.pshare.enable" and "mainMem.useNamedFile" to FALSE. Now performance is very good with one major exception:

If I leave the guest running overnight, when I start using it again n the morning, the performance is absolutely horrible until I reboot the guest. This morning, from clicking "Start" to clicking "Turn off this computer" was 45 sec. It took about 15 min to reboot the guest.

Is there a memory leak in VMPlayer or some other issue that causes performance to degrade over time? Is there an issue with suspend on the guest that causes somethig similar (maybe WIndows XP Power Saving or Suspend features)?

The host has 6GB of memory. I have 2GB allocated to the guest. The pertinetn information is below:

memsize = "2048"
MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"
sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"

VMware dead

newpuiple — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:22:48 GMT

Could you please help me? I could not open my VMware after installed a solaris 10. I got the message when I tried to open the original one windows XP. The message is:"Unable to open file "C:\BI-Web-Pro\BI-Web-Pro.vmdk": One of the disks in this virtual machine is already in use by a virtual machine or by a snapshot."

Thanks for your response!

performance problems and vmi soon depricated?

ericdl — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:24:52 GMT

Hello,

We are running a vm with a Linux guest. In this machine we run some custom written C software that accesses a database, performs some action on this data and then some output is generated.

At first, our performance was terrible -- the virtual machine was about twice as slow as the physical machine, while our vmware servers are much more powerful in CPU.

Then, we discovered paravirtualisation with a paravirtualized kernel on the vm. This ment a huge perfomance boost for us, we superceded the speed of the physical machine.

Now I have read that VMI (paravirtualisation) will be depricated in future vmware products (from 2010), and in the Linux kernel mailinglists they are already talking about removing this option from kernel 2.6.37.

Why does VMWare wants to remove VMI, and why so suddenly and so soon ? What can be the reason that we need paravirtualisation to obtain decent speeds and how can we obtain the same results without paravirtualisation ? Does anybody has an idea where to look ?

Thanks!
Eric.

How to handle Vendor\Application requirements (physical) in VMWare

gbattiston — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:02:34 GMT

We have thoroghly embraced virtualization in our organization and it seemed to be going smoothly until the Application folks start to get involved. We have had many App owners refuse to move to virtualized servers unless we give in to what they say are "Application" or vendor requirements. For example i am being asked to build an app server and i would go about it using our standard deploy of a guest with 1vCPU and 1GB RAM. The application folks are quoting vendor documentation saying that the server must have a minimum of 2 CPUs and 8GB RAM. If i were to give in to all the different vendor \ application requirements then my host would be full after only 10 VMs!!

is there a tool or some sort of logic that would help in breaking down application requirements, for a physical server, and translating that into actual or needed requirements in a virtual server? or is it simply that if the server needs 4 GB RAM in physical, then it needs it in virtual also?

ballooned performance counter

xavier@lynk.com — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:34:10 GMT

I am running vSphere. I have an ESX with plenty RAM (16GB) for some light VMs.
I have this RHEL 5.3 Linux VM that I setup awhile ago with 4GB of RAM configured size and noticed that the Memory>Active is almost always very low (average 550MB). So I decided to play with the limit value and set it to 2GB. Almost right away I noticed that the balloon counter started going up and down, but I don't see the swap counters (swapped, swap in, swap out) showing anything.

Does that mean the the balloon counter is simply reclaiming some of the other 2GB of memory I limited the VM for using it for other purposes? or does this balloon counter is pointing to an issue?
See image attached.

VMWare performance resources

websense — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:50:25 GMT

Can someone help me answer these questions and/or provide me with resource(s) where I can find this information myself.

+ As you indicate, hard number comparisons are the sort of gold standard that we are looking for.+
I would be especially interested in one that did a comparison something like this:

A. System A - VM system with two VMs, each running a server that is under load
+B. System B - A single OS, right on top of bare metal, with those same two servers running on it under the same load+Take this basic A versus B test and compare it along a bunch of parameters:
1. Heavy Disk I/O load
2. Memory intensive load
3. CPU intensive load
4. Some combinations
5. What did it look like at ‘startup' versus steady state
6. What are the boundary conditions; scenarios in each of A and B where you can cause particularly bad contention, etc.
+7. Etc.+Something like that seems to me like it would be particularly useful, as it would help to really characterize the sort of servers that could be put on VM without worry. And it would bring clarity to the sort of performance degradation (or user impact) that you should expect in various scenarios. Armed with that kind of data, it would be much easier to say "Process X can be VM'd without a second thought, while Process Y should only be VM'd under these conditions..., and Process Z will actually benefit from being put by itself on its own VM...", etc.

Thanks,

Kevin

Per-VM I/O Monitoring On NFS Datastores

deltajoka — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:53:17 GMT

I realize that this issue has been up on the forums before, but no real alternative solution has been posted. So the purpose of this post is to hopefully stir up some discussion.

We have recently migrated from local VMFS datastores to NFS datastores on a IBM System Storage N3300 Model A20 filer (basically a rebranded NetApp). It is no longer possible to get statistics of per-VM I/O in vCenter or by using esxtop on the ESX hosts. We have filed a Support Case to VMware about this, but there is apparently no solution on the VMware side of things. VMware just refers to monitoring this on the NFS filer side. On the IBM filer, we can only monitor I/O per volume (and having a volume per VM is just not feasible). There is no way (that we know of) to monitor I/O per file on the NFS filer.

We think this is a huge drawback for NFS datastores (which is quite popular). Quite frankly, we are surprised that VMWare don't seem to be interesting in implementing this.

Has anyone managed to implement an alternative solution to monitor this? We are currently trying to build a solution that promiscuously captures NFS traffic on the storage network with tools like tshark/wireshark. But progress is slow due to the hassle of tracking back filehandlers to specific files and directories.

Any constructive input is most welcomed!

Regards,

Johan Karlsson

.

Scissor — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:50:28 GMT

Slow RAM performance- is this normal?

AR1111 — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 06:45:00 GMT

Hi,

Our (outsourced) IT department has given us a virtual machine but we have noticed that the RAM speed is very slow when compared to a normal desktop. When we run benchmarking software on it (www.passmark.com) it tells us that the RAM read and write speed for large blocks of RAM (4MB to 512MB) is less than 200MB/sec as opposed to 800MB per second plus speed achieve on a normal desktop machine. Is it normal that RAM speed should be 4 times slower on a server running VMWare?

The limited details I can obtain about the host are:

Host is a "new" Intel server machine

It's runnning ESX or ESXi (not sure which sorry)

There are over 40 virtual machines running on this server (hence I assume it has more than 40 CPUs)

CPUs are "Dual 2.93GHz Intel Xeon X7350"

Details about the guest are:

Allocated RAM= 8GB

Operating System= Windows Server 2003 SP2 (64bit)

-VMWare Tools are installed

I am highly suspecious this is a NUMA node issue but IT are relutant to give us any access whatsoever to the underlying host or to change the CPU and memory affinity settings away from "all." I don't think the affinity setting is at fault anyway because we see no improvement in performance even after a long time (4 hours of looping some code). I would have though that the performace would gradually improve over time as VMWare is suppose to optimise the memory allocation every 2 seconds?

My idea's about what the fault might be are:

1) Servers (as opposed to desktops) normally have slow access speed and I just didn't know this? or

2) IT have given us a cheap host with either slow RAM or a slow Front Side Bus (FSB)? or

3) There is a BIOS setting on the host you have to enable in order for VMWare to optimise memory?

Any insights into the above problem would be greatly appreciated thank you.

esxtop reports wrong zero values for CPU and Memory (Service Console)

Timo1970 — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:35:33 GMT

Hi everybody!

We are working on a BMC Performance Manager (PATROL) Integration based on the esxtop command in batch mode.

The integration works fine yet but esxtop reports zero values for several service console CPU and memory values but

they aren't zero at all as esxtop in interactive mode shows correctly?

Does anybody know about this problem.

It is ESX Server 3.5.0 Update 4 on IBM hardware ...

Thanks in advance and kind regards ...

Timo

Any Performance Advantages Using Multiple Virtual Hard Disks? (eg, SQL Server)

DonJuanJovi — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:52:08 GMT

Hi Everyone,

First post here (long time listener, first time caller, lol)...

I have always wondered, is there any performance gains to using multiple disks in a VM? A specific example would be a virtualized SQL server - it's always said you should seperate the database and log files (to keep them contiguous). Or to be more general, the swap file of any Windows OS should be placed on 2nd drive if possible.

Does this apply to VM's as well? It's not really a disk to begin with, and the virtual disks sit on a group of shared physical disks, so.....

If anyone has some insight or, better yet, can point me towards any document or benchmark concerning this, that would be great!

webserver workload failing with "[FATAL] Exceeded max allowed overthink time" errors

qc4vmware — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:14:30 GMT

I am now getting errors in my webserver run. When I run just this workload I don't seem to get any errors in the .out file. When I run the full tests I first start seeing these:

2009-09-29 15:33:33:019 WorkloadScheduler[7]: Warning: Think time of 2000 msec exceeded by 1984 msec for state 4; total oversleep: 4062 msec

Then see a bunch of these

WorkloadScheduler(90): FATAL Exceeded max allowed overthink time of 121 sec. Please ensure that neither the server or client(s) are overloaded. If server is overloaded, consider reducing the number of SIMULTANEOUS_SESSIONS requested. If client(s) appear overloaded, add more clients.

Any suggestions on how to stabilize this so my runs always complete? The client is a VM but it is on a separate blade in the same chassis. These are HP C class blades with tons of ram and 3ghz processors on them. I am only running one tile at this point.

CPU Utilization More

nellore — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:28:16 GMT

Iam using HP Blade Server for VMware with hard disk size of 72GB CPU Utilization 40% for 8hours is and VMware is working fine, but after increased my HDD size to 300GB now presently utilizations are high for 8hours it is 70% I have only changed Hard Disk.

If any has faced same issue plz help me out to get Utlization Normal.

Any known ways to increase Video Ram?

haduis — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:34:54 GMT

It looks like VMWare defaults to 128 MB of video memory, any increase in this would help me immensely.

Any known ways to do this?

Disk write speed is very slow with Dell SAS 6/iR controller

steph22 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:27:38 GMT

Hello everyone,

All my virtual machines are very slow regarding the disk writing speed .... about 8 MB/sec (The read speed is ok: 65 MB/sec.).

I have two servers with this configuration:

* Dell PowerEdge R610
* 12GB Memory (6x2GB) 1333MHz Dual Ranked UDIMMs
* E5520 Xeon Processor, 2.26GHz 8M Cache, 5.86 GT/s QPI, TurboHT
* ESXi 4 (intalled on a USB Drive)
* Datastore = 2 x 146GB 10K RPM Serial-Attach SCSI 2.5" in RAID 1 (SAS 6/iR Integrated Controler)
* 4 VM's running (2 x Windows 2003 Server x64 / Windows 2003 Server x32 / Windows 2008 WebServer x32) VM Controller: LSI Logic Parallel

The 2 servers (all virtual machine) have the same problem (Disk Write Speed = 8MB/sec. for all VMs). It's very slow.

I found that the Dell SAS6/iR is basically a re-branded LSI 1068E ( http://communities.vmware.com/message/1327115#1327115 ) and it's supposed to be supported by vmware.

I found also that another person seem to have the same problem with the LSISAS1068 ( http://communities.vmware.com/thread/114158 )

Any ideas ?? Does other people experience the same problem ?

Thanks

Stress and Volume Testing

campbellabbey — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:34:20 GMT

Has anyone had experience with conducting SVT on a ESX 3.5 production cluster. I have concerns that conducting such tests on a production cluster might have adverse effects on other VM's running in the cluster?

Does anyone have any information on how ESX handles resources for SVT on an appliction? Specifically around Disk and network I/O. Could there potnetially be a situation where the SVT of one application could cause all applications on the cluster to be effected performance wise?

Thanks

Cam

Best hardware solution for moving our envoirnment to VM

itswitch01 — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:09:25 GMT

We are looking to move our servers to VM using ESX.

We have:

1 x Windows 2008 SBS server running AD, Exchange, Sophos

1 x Windows 03 R2 running SQL Server and Kaseya (database of 2GB)

1 x Windows 03 R2 running Quickbooks

1 x Windows 03 R2 running Microsoft Dynamics CRM & SQL Server (database of 3GB)

1 x Windows 03 running Terminal Services

1 x Fedora Box

Looking to put all the above into one Server box and run ESX.

We have about 10 internal users and about 100 customers accessing the CRM server.

What sort of HW should we look at using?

Dual or Quad core CPU? Intel or AMD? More than one CPU?

How many HDD and what RAID? SATA or SCSI?

How much RAM?

If you need more info, please ask. Thanks

VM with W2003 64bits & 4GB of RAM showing less (3.75GB)

RaMorn — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:10:47 GMT

Hi Folks,
I'm having the following question for you guys...

I had installed a VM with Windows Server 2003 Standard 64 bits, and I assigned to the VM 4GB.

But when it finished the installation it is showing 3.75 Gb....I was digging into the webpages, but it not seems to be related to software (I mean, I didn't find something like a switch to add to boot.ini file or something like this)

Has anyone experienced the same?

The ESX server where it is hosted is a HP Proliant G5 580 Intel.

I'll really appreciate your comments regarding this issue, I need to send official excuses if this could not be addressed.

Thanks!

Raul

STAF failing to start in webserver and fileserver systems

qc4vmware — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:01:41 GMT

I just moved a working tile to a different subnet and had to re-ip all of the systems. I don't know if this could possibly have anything to do with staf also not automatically running on boot for the webserver and fileserver systems. When I reboot each system I have to now manually execute the /etc/init.d/start-staf.sh script on both of those nodes. Oddly the database system and all windows system seem to still be working fine. Anyone have an idea on what might have went wrong? I am stumped and it seems like a pretty straight forward thing. Can you point me to a log that might shed some insight?

Paul

Capacity Planning and scaling with over subscription in mind..

wade001 — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:41:30 GMT

I sat in on an enlightening session (TA2627 Understanding Host and Guest Memory and other memory management ...) and took the information from that session to reviewed my current cluster statistics finding that guest usage is consistently much lower than Host usage stats. My HOST do not have any sign of initiating Ballooning or swapping however the Host memory usage is nearing 70 % total capacity on each host.

We are trying to devise some metrics surrounding cluster resources that will trigger alerts for adding capacity to the cluster as needed however would like to balance the alerts allowing us to commit resources based on actual usage rates. As it stands now our Host memory usage will be pushed beyond current default warning thresholds from a virtual center alerts stand point but actual guest usage rates will be far from exceeding total memory commitments currently allocated. We would like to understand some key metrics to monitor to avoid performance issues while allowing to oversubscribe resources based on actual VM usage. We sell resources for servers incrementally and are finding that in many cases customers are purchasing more resources that they really require to run their services.

Any ideas or key metrics to monitor that will enable us to setup alerting for capacity upgrades?

Should we consider capacity upgrades when ESX Host reach 90% usage even while guest VM usage combined in no where near that total percentage of memory being used??

Thanks

Virtual machines poor performance after idle time.

EranL — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:24:26 GMT

Hi Team,

I'm having some issues with virtual machines being slow to respond to the first request.
After a machine is idle for a while (30 minutes and up), the first request to it (when opening a webpage or remote desktop to it) is extremely slow! Respond time is between 15 to 30 seconds.
BTW during this time, ping times are excellent.
When the page finally appears, subsequent page requests have excellent response times.

Our infrastructure is VC 3.5 and some 3.5 ESX’s
Any thought?

Thank you.

Eran Levi

Linux VM, rsync throughput question

oznomad — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 03:58:26 GMT

Q : Does esx 4.0 have inherent network throttling ?

Background : I am
using rsync to backup from a physical Linux machine to an identical VM Linux
machine.

The Physical machine has a Gigabit Card

The VM hosts (Running esx4) has a Gigabit card

The Linux VM is using the E1000 Gigabit card

The Physical Machine and the VM Host are on a Gigabit switch

Problem: When I start the transfer, I get 40-45MB/s which is great, however after about
10mins, the rates starts to drop further and further until we get to around
0.5-1.0 MB/s.

There is no other significant traffic on the network and the
both the source & destination machines are busy, but not stretched by any
means.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

VM CPU issue?

KNardi — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:39:31 GMT

ESX Vsphere

I have many VM's on VSphere and recently noticed that the VM's that have 1 CPU show MULTIPROCESSOR in Device manager/Computer.

Is this normal or something I should be concerned with?

Is there any HAL or overhead that will cause issues?

thanks for you help in advance

XP guest slows down when moved to Quad / Vista 64 from XP host

fgenest — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:10:09 GMT

The old host is a single core AMD Athlon 64 3500+ @ 2.21 GHz 2Gb RAM running XP pro 32 bits.

The new host is a Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.40 GHz 6Gb RAM running Vista Home Premium 64 bits.

The virtual machine is running XP Pro 32 bits and the game Guild Wars, a not so recent multiplayer 3D game.

My question is why does the VM run so slowly when playing on the new computer when it is working very well on the old one? My first uneducated guess was that there is a performance cost to running a 32 bit guest on a 64 bit host. Now that I have searched a little bit, I get the impression that it is a synchronization problem due to the multiple cores. Is this a correct assessment? What can I do to monitor/improve performance?

edit: I have workstation installed on my linux box, the VMs are run by VMware Player 2.51 on both windows machines.

Virtulize SQL on local storage

Newb449 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:40:14 GMT

Guys,

I hope I'm posting this in the right place.

I have a requirement to provide a virtulization solution on a very tight budget. As a result, I only have 2 ESXi 4 hosts with 32GB RAM and local storage, although I am toying around with the idea of iSCSI and OpenFiler on a dedicated box as a shared storage solution.

I am concerned about virtulizing SQL 2005 on this platform. Not so much SQL, but running SQL on a single ESXi 4 host with local storage (RAID 5). I'm concerned about the disk I/O contention between the virtualised SQL server and the other VMs. There's also the issue of the SQL server itself consuming disk/memory resources from its host to the point that it would not be practical for it to be virtualised.

I'll need to run 2 SQL applications to start off with. One has a 8GB minimum RAM requirement, and the other ha s a 2GB minimum requirement. This will take away from the amount of RAM I can give to other VMs.

From what I've read, SQL performance is improved when you have different RAID types and different drives for the DBs/transaction logs. These options are not possible with local storage.

I would welcome some opinion on if:

Running SQL on a single ESX4i host with local storage is ever a good idea

If it is more acceptable to use iSCSI storage

Thanks

Quad core - and 32 bit application

puchw — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 23:27:15 GMT

Hello,

I have application that use only one core.... is it possible when i use VMWare workstation on my PC with x64 bit Windows 7 system to force this application use full 4 cores ??

Best Regards

Packet loss on Sun Fire X4140 / ESXi 3.5u4

HMVM123 — Tue, 19 May 2009 19:30:46 GMT

I have a Sun Fire X4140 system with 4 Nvidia nForce Pro 3600/3050 based NICs. On this system, I have ESXi 3.5 Update 4 running and further, a single VM running a slightly modified CentOS 4.4 distribution.

I've attached one of the interfaces on the VM to a virtual switch connected to one of the physical interfaces. Everybody is in promiscous mode, so that I can install a sniffer application in the VM.

To test the system, I have a separate physical host replay a pcap file to the sniffing interface and I see most of the traffic that's being sent. Unfortunately, there's definite packet loss that grows somewhat linearly with traffic rates. At 1Mbps, I lose around 0.05% of packets. As the rate rises to 200Mbps, the loss approaches 5%. I'm trying to understand the causes for this packet loss.

What's interesting is that VIClient gives me packet numbers that match precisely the number sent. ifconfig inside the VM is where I first see the loss. There are no obvious error messages and the system doesn't appear to be under stress.

Any pointers out there? I certainly notice that ESXi is presenting my VM with an e1000 adaptor interface, while it probably uses forcedeth under the covers to manage the physical interface. Any value in going with vmxnet?

Any help will be much appreciated!

SQl server performance down after migration from P to V..now we have allocated 6 GB ram and 4vCPU and 3 GB reserverd RAM but no improvement..its taking double time for mdf data copying in copriason with P

Kitu045 — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:31:00 GMT

Pradeep K Yadav
Pradeep045@gmail.com
VMware & VDI administrator