guest OS slow

[domino]

Hi,

I apologies if this question is directed to the wrong audience. I inherited this server from a previous system administrator. We have 15 Windows XP guests on this server and all the guest OS are running very, very slow. I have disabled unneeded services, disabled themes, uninstalled any applications we don't use.

The guest are running Windows XP SP3 default install. We do not anyone permission to install other applications. So nothing special installed on any of the guest OS. Is 15 Windows XP running at the same time too much for this server? I'm new to this virtual environment and I hope someone will educate me on the rule of thumb for such an environment.

Motherboard: Intel S5000PSL

Processor: Intel Xeon L5420, 2.5Ghz; 2 CPUs, 8 cores

Memory: 16378MB, 80Mb System, 16300MB Virtual Machines

Storage: x2 750Gb HITACHI HTS727575A9E364, 7200 RPM, Serial-ATA/300

Windows XP resources:

500MHz dedicated processor

1gig dedicated RAM

If this is posted in the wrong forum, I apologize and I hope a moderator can move it to the appropriate community.

Kind regards,

Rommel

[sparrowangelste]

500mhz might be not be enough.

how is the resources in your summary tab if you select your host?

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Two thought about this:

First remove the CPU limit for the VM's. Unless you run any applications which may "go crazy" the host's CPU scheduler usually does a good job.

The second though is about your storage. The SATA 7200k disks may limit disk performance. If the disks are not attached to a real hardware RAID controller with battery buffered write-cache  (to operate in write-back mode) the performance will be low due to the fact that ESXi does not do OS based caching for security reasons. In addition to this XP does not align the partitions properly. By default it will start the first partition at 31.5kb which requires to always read/write two physical blocks if one block would be sufficient.

André

[domino]

Hi and thank you for the helpful response! Please ask more question and I will gather them all on one post so that they do not get fragmented. I have full access to the ESXi machine. @sparrowangels, I will collect the information for you. Any logs and screen shots ya'll need I can supply.

[domino]

btw a.p the drives aren't used on RAID. They both are used as datastores 1 and 2.

[sparrowangelste]

so 1 7200 RPM, Serial-ATA/300 drive among 7-8 guests + low ram + low cpu is probably the reason why you have issues.

since its not raided the maximum io throughput is for 1 disk alone.

run iometer on one of the xp machines

how to setup iometer: http://greg.porter.name/wiki/HowTo:iometer

good site.

[domino]

I will get that info asap!