VMware Cloud Community
learnlearn
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-24-2011 05:27 PM

Configuring VM ware hosts performance best practice (I have an issue)

Hi,

I have a fairly old server, but it doesnt do much. Just a test lab at home. Its a HP DL380 G3 server, dual 3.2Ghz and 12GB RAM, installed vmware ESX 3.5.

Now I have 6 Windows 2003/2008 hosts on it, I have set memory for all to be 4GB each, but they dont all come on at thesame time. When I had 3 hosts, the performance was acceptable, but although saying this the RAID array was built on a raid 0. Now that I have rebuilt the array on a RAID 5, and added 3 extra hosts, I am not sure if its the IO that is slow or just the fact that i am no way a VM ware expert and just someone learning on the job.

I have started to read about vmware best practices, but I want to share my problem with others, I have seen things around memory/cpu reservation etc, I dont think I have done any of that. Also the physical server has 12GB RAM, but i find that i still have vswap files of 4GB each, this makes me to believe that its using the disk swap files as memory for the VM hosts, pls correct me if i am wrong. What i want to know is, what is happenning to all the 12GB RAM on the server itself.

Thanks in advance.

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5 Replies
learnlearn
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-24-2011 05:31 PM

All the hosts are so slow, it takes about 15 minutes to boot up a server. I'm sure this isnt normal.

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idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal
‎03-24-2011 05:32 PM

vmware supports memory over commit, memory ballooning, compression and transparent page sharing. yes the vswap size = the number of memory you assigned to the virtual machine. if you have raid5, then the raid penalty would be 4 hence it's would be slower than raid 0. to know whether it can cater the needs of additional 3 hosts really depends on how heavy your virtual machine on the disk IOPS. http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/12/23/iops/

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idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal
‎03-24-2011 05:33 PM

please enable esxtop and from there you will be able to find the culprit that causes the slowness. http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9279

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learnlearn
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-24-2011 05:58 PM

In very simple terms, what do I need to do to gather information using esxtop ?

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idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal
‎03-24-2011 06:33 PM

look at this http://www.yellow-bricks.com/esxtop/ it gives you a list of value to look out and the threshold value.

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