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scottf99
Contributor
Contributor

100% CPU x64 Server 2008 Vsphere

Hi. Reasonably new to ESX and certainly new to Communities. Hope this is the right place to post and get help..

I have 8 IBM Blade Servers running ESX4 164009, Vcentre 4, Hitachi SAN. All VM Boot drives on various VMFS LUNs on the SAN and all data drives are Raw Mapped LUNS. Performance is overall pretty good. Most Servers are Dual Core AMD Opterons and two are Quad Core AMD Opterons.

My issues involves a 2xCPU Quad Core Blade with 32GB Ram but essesntially the problem is the same with all Hosts. I have one VM on this Host running Server 2008 x64 and SQL Server 2008 x64. I gave it one CPU and 20GB Ram. Have tried playing around with number of CPUs with little success.

The problem is the CPU under the guest and on the Performance Tab of the VM on VC is running at 100%. We have a much heavily loaded Server 2003 x86 / SQL 2005 VM that runs along nicely.

I have run TOP on the console but I believe that only reflects the COS. I have run esxtop on the console but I dont understand the figures, eg 700% Used Idle.

Regardless of CPU reporting tools, ie task manager, VC performance, ESXTOP, the SQL is really slow compared to other SQL VServers with regards to running queries, etc.

I understand I may need to give more information but I would really appreciate some help with this as I have been asked to move back to a physical server for SQL. I REALLY dont want this thread to be a discussion on PvV for SQL as I have been through all that. THis is the only VM on this HOST and I believe it should perform much better.

My thoughts are maybe 64bit Server 2008, Vcpu config... not too sure really. The disk and network is the same as other Servers. Really the only difference is the OS and SQL versions.

Thanks

Scott

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drummonds
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Scott,

Diagnosing performance problems like this is very tricky and can take time. I have tried my best to document the process for performance troubleshooting here: .

My experience is that 90% of SQL performance problems are coming from storage that was not provisioned for performance requirements. Start with the storage section in the above document and consider using vscsiStats ().

Scott

More information on my communities blog and on Twitter:

http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/drummonds

More information on my blog and on Twitter: http://vpivot.com http://twitter.com/drummonds
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