Hi there,
I have a 3 host ESX cluster with the following stats:
2 hosts with 8 x 2.6GHz procs w/16GB RAM
1 host with 8 x 2.6GHz procs w/12GB RAM
These hosts are connected to an HP MSA1500CS with 1 shelf of disks, via a Brocade Fiber switch. I have 2 LUN's, 1 with 8-146GB drives, RAID 5, 957GB, and 1 with 6 - 300GB drives, RAID 5, 1.36 TB. I have 27 VM's and my VM's are evenly distributed across both LUNs.
Almost all of the VM's are running Windows, with a few Linux VM's sprinkled in. The VM's are running apps that tend to be more CPU/Memory heavy rather than disk.
My problem is that the VM's are just dog slow and performance seems to be affected by every little thing that happens on other servers. For instance, if I try to deploy a machine from a template it takes over an hour (30 GB Windows 2003 template), and during that time other servers bog down heavily. Also, anytime one VM is doing anything heavy it tends to spill over into other VM's and hurts their performance.
I've read that 10 VM's is the recommended max per LUN so I know I'm exceeding this recommendation. Without having a place to put my VM's though, I'm stuck with the two LUN's. Can anybody recommend anything I can do to help achieve better performance? Any thoughts on how I can figure out where the true bottleneck is?
Thanks,
--Brandon