64 bit guest maxes CPU while host is 20% or less

[JanSiegrist]

Greetings all, I'm a newbie...

I've just installed a 64 bit guest: Win2k03 Std 64, on a vmware 2.0 server, the host os is Win2k03 Std 32. The processor is an AMD Opteron quad core with 2 gigs of ram. I've installed Exchange 07 on the guest. Running any of the management tasks max out the guest CPU while the Host seldom goes past 20%. Performance on the guest is very slow doing almost any management tasks.

Q1: Is there any way to give more host CPU to the guest os?

Q2: Would deploying a guest on an ESXi server yield significantly better performance? [ more than 25% better]

Q3: If electing to go to ESXi, can the guest OS file(s) be copied off of the existing drive(s) and be copied back to the ESXi drives(s) ? or do you need to go through vmware converter?

Other: I typically manage the guest os via an RDP connection as I've found that running the guest console on the host slows things even more.

TIA

Jan

[mhonman]

How many CPUs does your guest have? If the host has 4 independent processors (true of a quad-core setup) and only one of them is allocated to the guest, you will see no more than 25% utilisation on the host.

[JanSiegrist]

The guest has just one processor, however when I setup the guest it would only allow a maximum of 2 virtual processors, on another thread someone said it did not matter much if you had one or two virtual processors. I have noticed that the load on the host seems to spread across all 4 processors when working on the guest not just one. The host OS, BTW, is dedicated to mainly running the guest.