Hardware: Dell VRTX, 3 M620 Blades, 2-10 Core CPU's/Blade (40 Logical Cores Total/Blade), 128 GB RAM/Blade (Will be upgraded to 192 GB RAM/Blade in the near future.)
Operating System On Each VM: Windows Server 2012 R2 64 bit
I currently have five (5) VM's running. I am new to VM's and I was very generous in CPU/RAM/Disk Space Allocation when I setup these VM's. I have been told to add three (3) additional VM's. One (1) of these three (3) new VM's should very light since the installed software won't take up resources.
The software vendor for all three of the new VM's talks about one portion of their installed Apps on one of the VM's sometimes having problems with CPU contention, if more than one (1) CPU is allocated for the VM where the software is installed. The software Vendor talks about VM's using more resources, caching, etc. The software vendors shows the CPU Requirements for a Physical Server as: Intel Pentium Dual Core Processor (2 GHz). This software vendor also refers to more CPU allocation sometime degrading performance.
My Current CPU & RAM Allocations are:
VM #1: 8 Logical Cores - 64 GB RAM
VM #2: 4 Logical Cores - 16 GB RAM
VM #3: 4 Logical Cores - 32 GB RAM
VM #4: 4 Logical Cores - 16 GB RAM
VM #5: 8 Logical Cores - 32 GB RAM
Proposed Future VM's:
VM #6: 4 Logical Cores - 16 GB RAM
VM #7: 4 Logical Cores - 16 GB RAM
VM #8: 2 Logical Cores - 8 GB RAM
VM #7 is the one with the software that the Vendor is concerned about.
Currently:
Blade #1 has VM's 1 & 2
Blade #2 has VM's 3 & 4
Blade #3 has VM 5
From your experience:
1. What resources issues have you came across related to CPU contention, caching, RAM usage?
2. Does what I propose above seem like it would have Resource Contention Problems resulting in the system getting bogged down?
3. What are the best ways/tools to monitor Resource Contention/Resource Usage?
4. If I wanted to briefly shut down a VM and decrease the CPU Cores and/or RAM Allocated, does this have any negative impact on Windows Licensing? It seems like it would have no impact on Licensing since Windows should see only a minor hardware change(s).
Thanks in Advance.
