Does the performance of the ESX OS hard disk affect the performance of ESX in any way?

[John2010]

Hi

Does the performance of the ESX OS hard disk (e.g.

between SATA and SAS) affect the performance of ESX in any way?

(To clarify, I'm asking about the hard disk that ESX is

installed on, not the hard disk that the VMFS volumes are on).

This information will help us determine if the benefit of

faster disks for the ESX OS outweigh the additional cost.

Thanks!

John

[rogard]

No. The only it could would be if the service console was under provisioned and caused swapping.

[J1mbo]

Since the physical number of drive bays is usually limited, it could also be put that allocating disks exclusively for ESX reduces the overall performance of the machine, since the machine would very likely perform better with those drives operating in one large RAID volume for everything (and especially if this opens up RAID-10 to reach the desired capacity).

HTH

http://blog.peacon.co.uk

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[John2010]

Hi Rogard

Thanks for the response.

My understanding of ESX Server is that there are 2 parts: the hypervisor and the service console.

Have I understood your response correctly, and that the hypervisor and the service console (if sufficiently provisioned), will run in memory and access the OS hard disk minimally? Hence meaning that the performance of the ESX OS Hard disk does not affect the performance of ESX?

If I have understood properly, do you have any pointers as to documentation on this so I can read up about the theory and the practice of it?

Thanks

John

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Forums - There are two parts that the speed of local disk will affect perfomance - it is during the boot of the ESX hosts it will delay the starting of the ESX server starting - the other as the others have said if you do not confgure/use the Service Console effectively - the things that should be done to insure your service console is configured approriately -

1. Set the memory of the sevrice console to its maximum of 800 MB - which means when installing ESX you set the swap space to 2x800 or 1.6 GB -

2. When accessing your virtual machines use either RDP or SSH this will reduce the load on the service console

3. Minimize running anything extra in the Sevrice Console -

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