Performance issues in VM's when cloning...

[hjelmar]

Hi..

We have a VDI installation running on ESX 3.5u2, and VDM 2.5, and are having some performance issues in the VM's.

Let me try to explain our setup:

ESX:

Quad core 2.0Ghz Xeon, 18GB RAM, and 4 x146 GB SAS disks running in 2 RAID 0's. GigaBit network all the way...

We are running Virtual Center and The Broker as VM's on the ESX.

The purpose of this installation is, for our sales staff to demonstrate our products in VM's that always stays the same (This is the primary goal) and only changed by support staff. And we are only talking about 10 running VM's , 2 of these logged in..

Because of this, we constantly deploy new VM's from templates whenever a user logs out, and the "old" Vm is deleted.

I have monitored the ESX sever on RAM, Disk Usage, Network and system when the performance in the logged in VM's go down (Becomes sluggish), but I can't see anything alarming.... I was wondering if it could be an Disk I/O issue, since the VM is running off the same disk as Virtual Center, and the cloning process.

I was hoping someone could give me a hint :D...or a kick in the ass if deserved :smileyangry:

I know this is'nt the optimal conditions, running VC and Broker in VM's but it's the only way for us at the moment..

Regards

Kenneth

[FredPeterson]

Have you looked at the disk latencies? Is the RAID controller battery backed with cache? It makes an ENORMOUS difference in performance if a local disk has battery backed cache. One single instance of a VM being copied/cloned could easily drag both disks down.

Also, its kind of scary you're running RAID 0's. You do know what happens if you just lose one disk right?

[madcult]

Did you solve your problem? We seem to have the same issue.

5 or 6 Microsoft Windows XP virtual machines run well on my small test environment until I deploy a new virtual machine from a template. Even if only one Microsoft Windows XP virtual machine is running and I deploy a new virtual machine from a template performance is poor. I hardly cannot do anything on this virtual machine.

Any ideas?

[NWhiley]

As well as using esxtop on the hosts, it is worth looking at the guest OS to see what that is doing.

I've seen both RHEL and Windows VMs crawl because they were paging heavily, while ESX looked tip top.