Hey all,
Read through comments on the community and read some of VMWare's docs but I'm still a bit confused on sizing our environment. Currently we have 7 Dell 2950 (2 socket, 2 cores) /w 16GB on a FC Clarion SAN memory getting somewhere between 12-16 VM's per server. Using the very reserved numbers of 6 vCPUs per core (I've read that some are getting 8-10 per core), I should be getting 2 sockets X 2 cores X 6 vCPU's per Core = ~24 light/moderate loaded VM's. Unfortunately I'm not getting quite that performance on my ESX servers. The boxes are mostly Windows 2003 R2 Standard /w SP2 (web servers, file servers, print servers, and some light application servers). Looking through Virtual Center, I'm seeing the hosts at about 60-70% utilization for memory. I use three Resource Pools (not limited to the resources of the Cluster) to break up resources of my cluster. The pools are:
High Pool with 6 machines having a 512 MB reservation and 650 Mhz CPU reservation
Medium Pool with 10 machines having 256 MB reservation and no CPU reservation
Low Pool with all other machines having no reservations (Memory or CPU)
Am I doing something wrong with my configs. All VM's are freshly built on VMWare and have been tweaked (no graphical features, screen saver, unecessary services, etc.). The only thing I can think of is that the VM's are configured with 1024-2048 MB of memory. Could this be the issue? Should I drop the memory allocated in the VMX file for the Low Pool VM's to ~256-384 MB? Virtual Center shows most them using 400-900 MB of memory usage so I'm not to sure I want to drop them to ~256-384 MB due to lack of memory (or is that where the VMWare memory sharing piece comes into play?).
To add to all this, we're looking to grow our environment and they want me to look into a new platform that will give more saturation (somewhere in the upper 20's and low 40's). I've been looking at a Dell R900 (4 socket, 4 cores) /w 64 GB (ESX 3i with no local disks) of memory but with my current scenario issues, I'm not sure I'll get the saturation they're looking for with the R900 as I have it configured. Can anyone shed some light on this for me since I'm trying to fix the current environment and plan for the upcoming environment.
Thanks,
Roger
