Using ESXi 6 for Virtual Development Environment

[Lypheus]

Hey All -

I'm engaging the IT dept here to help setup virtualized development environments - we are using VS2013, Windows 2012 R2, etc... and finding the performance of the VM's to be sub par.  The main problem was an overloaded SAN - so we've used a dedicated SSD for the G9 blade this is running on. 

Performance is now "not bad" not but still leaves something to be desired. 

I'm a bit confused if this is something endemic with VMware ESXi 6 or not - currently at home i'm running an older ESXi 4 setup and have two "virtual workstations" running off my old quad core deskop with 24GB ram (less than the ram we allocated each of the VM's) and a platter drive (7200 rpm) and getting ~25% better performance.

Is there a checklist of items we should run through when attempting this?  I'd like to get my developers and QA all virtualized in-house, which means roughly a dozen VM's built through vagrant and promoted to ESXi via chef.  But currently the test VM we're using is not even matching the performance of running the same VM image via VirtualBox on our developers laptops.

That seems very odd to me, there has to be some things we're missing here - any thoughts?

[virtualg_uk · Accepted solution]

ESXi 6 performs better then ever so there is likely some issue in your infrastructure.

Some things to check:

• Memory & CPU usage on the ESXi hosts, are they high?
• Is there high %CPU RDY on the VMs?
• Is your network between hosts, to-from hosts and switches / to from switches to workstations unusually high?
• Bandwidth to the SAN over iSCSI / FC / NFS, is this unusually high?
• IOPS on the SAN / Disk - Are these peaking the maximums

Check the performance charts for each ESXi host for most of the data, and ESXTOP

If you need any help, post back.

Help this is useful

[Lypheus]

Thanks for your help - this is exactly what I'm looking for, we'll go through each item and investigate further .