I will be moving over two of our ecommerce applications running on two Dell 1955 Quad Core blades under VM Server this weekend running within a Microsoft NLB environment.
Both servers typically run about 50% on the host and pretty high utilization within the VM session.
ESX 3 conversion will to identical hardware configuration, except using SAN for LUN storage.
What kind of performance gain can I expect going from VM server to ESX? The ecommerce application isn't very scalable is frequently spikes a lot at 100% within session. I can only handle about 175 users before customres start calling and complaining.
Once I have both servers up on my two ESX boxes, what can I do to monitor performance and what can be done to try and make things better before having to move back to the original VM Server box?
Are there any known issues with using NLB between ESX 3 using Unicast? Can I use Unicast across two ESX servers?
I've run into issues where I can't have my two servers under VM Server using NLB with a third host on ESX. Every time ESX host is stopped/started, it kills my NLB virtual IP and nobody can hit the servers.... I assume this is because of unicast.
Any insight or recommendations for this weekend would be appreciated. I'll be under the fire if server performance sucks!
