Some time ago, our web site (large council site) used to be on physical servers. No critial issues were experienced and as part of server consolidation the server was moved to vmware. A year ago during council elections, the site stopped working and would not respond throughout the day (.NET technology and SQL server backend on the same server).
This was not very good so we upgraded the server (2 x dual core 2.2 Ghz, 8Gig Memory, 100 Gig harddrive), changed the toolset to Sharepoint (sql still on the same server). Only one content website on the server and only one vmware on the blade. Snow came and due to parents looking at the web site our web site again stopped working all day. It finally recovered the next day (reboots, etc. made no difference).
Load testing gave unusual results in that the site at 15 connections slows down significantly. After the connections are dropped it seems to pick up ghost connections and stays slow for a while after. 100 connections kills the server completely. I refuse to think that a council website, to cope with 100 connections we would need to load balance 7 servers at (2 x dual core 2.2 Ghz, 8Gig Memory, 100 Gig harddrive).
We are trying to eliminate all possibilities and are asking whether anyone has seen this with vmware and if so, potential solutions?
Thanks
