What does the hypervisor overhead add to ESX?

[JonRoderick]

Anyone got any experience of this? Rough estimate? Memory/CPU/Disk/Networking?

Thanks.

[weinstein5]

Running esxtop from the command line will give you the information - my experience is nominal - but will vary with load and what its doing - if you are using IP Based storage you will see great network usage -

[RParker]

Actually Hypervisor doesn't do anything. the Kernel however is what is running. It depends on the number of VM's also.

Each VM adds about 200-500 Mhz of overhead to the machine, depending on the guest OS.

So technically it could be zero or it could be 2Ghz.. It depends

[JonRoderick]

Thanks. I've heard of 8-12% overhead introduced by the hypervisor in ESX - is that a reasonable number? I know that the memory overhead will cary depending on the number and type of workloads/OSs etc.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Your post has been moved to the Performance forum

Dave Mishchenko

VMware Communities User Moderator

[weinstein5]

That is a reasonable estimate -