VMware guest performance issue

[AGardner]

I am having a nightmare issue in regards to VM guest performance. We have an ESX 3.5 u4 cluster with three hosts. All existing guest are fine na run without issue. If I try and create a new virtual machine from either a template or from scratch, it installs fine. As soon as I start to use it, the machine performs like a dog. It becomes incredibly slow and reboots can take ten minutes (as opposed to about 20 seconds on existing machines). Ping response times are all over the place ranging from <1ms to over 3000.

The guest is not in a resource group, I've rebooted all the host servers and I'm currently migrating the machine to a different LUN. Looked in the event log on the machine, the vmware.log, vmkernel, etc and no issues are reported. Perfmon in the VM appears to report normal operation and the performance chart in vCenter looks Ok. NO idea what is going on. Atatached is the vmware.log extract for reference, any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Andrew

[admin]

A useful document to download and keep at hand: Performance Troubleshooting for VMware vSphere 4 and ESX 4 http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10352

Rick Blythe

Social Media Specialist

VMware Inc.

[VMmatty]

It's hard to say for sure what is causing the problem without more information. What is the configuration of the virtual machine in terms of vCPUs and memory? And what about the rest of the VMs on the host? Have you tried using esxtop from the Service Console to try to narrow down where the performance problems might be? One stat in particular that might be of help is the %RDY stat, which if higher than 10% would indicate performance problems on the guests. If you're unfamiliar with esxtop, here are some links to help get you started.

Commonly used esxtop performance counters: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-5240

Memory analysis: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-5430

CPU analysis: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-5420

Storage analysis: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-5490

Network analysis: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-5500