I have two environments: Both have same hardware specs.
1st Environment:
SLES10 SP2 32 bit is installed on a VM that is created on ESX 3.5 update5. On SLES10, Apache web server is running.
2nd Environment:
SLES11 32 bit is installed on a VM that is created on ESX 3.5 update5. On SLES11, Apache web server is running.
Note: On both environments, the VM is created with two CPUs/ 2GB RAM, 10GB HDD and 1GB network card. And on both environments, Apache is compiled from Apache 2.2.10 sources.
Using a HTTP test appliance (this is a WEB client, that generates HTTP_Get requests to the web server at a configurable rate), when HTTP_Get requests are done for a 4k object file, the WEB server on the 2nd environment gave poor performance (lesser than half) when compared that with the 1st environment.
With the 1st environment, on the top command output I have noticed that the CPUs are maxing at 7000 http_get transactions per second.
With the 2nd environment, on the top command output I have noticed that the CPUs are maxing at 3000 http_get transactions per second.
Also, an additional observation regarding hi (% CPU time spent on hardware interrupts) and si (% CPU time spent on software interrupts) CPU times from top command:
for 1st environment:
slowly increasing as the load increases to a max of 80%
for 2nd environment:
slowly increasing as the load increases to a max of 125%
On the second environment, ksoftirqd process in the 2nd case is consuming to a max of 18% (which should ideally not be more than 1% per cpu) and CPU is utilized at a quick pace.
Basically, It seems the problem lies with the ESX 3.5 support for SLES11 32 bit.
There is no specific install option for SLES11 on ESX 3.5. We tried both with "Suse Linux Enterprise Server" and with "Other Linux" install options from the drop down menu. Above observations stand in both install options.
Can anyone tell me what VM options on ESX 3.5 update 5 can improve SLES 11 32 bit performance?
If SLES 11 is not supported on ESX 3.5 update 5, when can we expect another update that supports SLES 11 32 bit in near future?
Thanks
Durgarao
