VM Speed Issues

[Dave19]

Hi, I have been having issues with my virtual pcs, Basically i have a Host with 10gb of Memory and on that Host i have about 15 windows 2000 Pro virtual pcs, The have been allocated 256 mb of ram and i have also reserved 256 for them. Some times they are almost unusable and the Host says that there is still over 5 gb free, During troubleshooting the only thing that shows up is the Guest - Mem % seems to be very High, However the amount Phisical Ram being user has not even come close to 256 in some cases, I think what is happening is that the pcs start wriring to the swap file and then the disks that the vms live on slows down and therefore slowing all the vm pcs down , I have upped my pc to 1 gb of ram and even do i am only using about 350 mb the Guest Mem % has risen to over 60 % heaps of times . Has anyone any ideas

I am Running ESX 3.0.2 . 52542

[gorto]

Number of points Dave:

1. You have reserved 256M and have an upper memory limit of 256M per guest - this does not allow ESX to dynamically balance the guest real memory requirements.

2. 256M could be a little low especially if you report the guest are using Windows swap - this will definitely impact on performance, swapping.

Recommendations would be to remove all memory Reservations and increase the total memory sizes of the guests that appear to swap the most - you have spare memory avaialble - use it.