poor performance on my homeserver esxi 4.1

[Slippern]

I have a esxi homeserver with very poor performance

My hardware:

Mainboard: Asus P5K64 WS

CPU: Intel Quad 2 Core Q9450

RAM: 6GB OZC PC3-1200

HDD: 1x WD Raptor 160gb, 1x Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB

Im running 4 vm, 3 of them is Windows 2008 R2, with 2 core and 4gb ram, the 4 vm is a Debian with 1 core and 1gb ram.

The 1st. server is a domain controller, the 2nd is a terminal server (no application is installed), the 3rd server has no task yet, and the Debian server is just a web-server.

None of the server has hevy load (or any load) and are just idling..

When im installing a program or booting one of server the other 3 is freezing (i cant even use RDP) until the operation is finished.

Is it becaus to little IO on the raptor disk?

Anyway iam planning to upgrade the hw with more ram and a better hdd..

Is this an okey SAS-disk for homeserver?

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=d97d38661f2a4210VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD&vgnextchann...

[AndreTheGiant]

Check in performance tab how is your datastore.

For example see write / read latency.

Andre

[DSTAVERT]

Having a write caching RAID controller and 4 or more drives in RAID 10 or RAID 5 will help. A single drive with a regular SATA controller can't effectively deliver the IO required for multiple OS's. I would, however, look through the ESXi host logs for any signs of errors, resets or timeouts just in case.

[Slippern]

write/read latency

Datastore1: 26/12ms write/read maximum. 

Datastore2: 70/16ms write/read maximum.

And the system logs is attached

[mcowger]

76+ms response times is very very poor.  I suspect you are just overloading the drive.

[Slippern]

I only have one VM on datastore2! that disk is gonna burn