VMs Feel Slow - Best Practices for Monitoring Resources

[scheunna]

I am running a Cluster with 3 ESX 3.0.2 hosts and approximately 35 Virtual Machines. All three hosts are Dual Core - 2-Way Athons with 16GB RAM each. Storage is on Fiber Channel SAN.

When I check the memory usage on any host from the summary tab I typically range between 10GB and 13GB out of 16GB. When I am running closer to the 13GB of RAM I notice that the VMs running on that server seem sluggish. Am I understanding this value correctly? Shouldn't I have 3GB more RAM available before shares start becoming utilized and begin noticing any performace degegration due to memory resouces.

Any additional suggestions are very welcome.

Thanks,

Nathan

[Milton21]

If you have free ram on your system and this seems to happen with your page... Could be your disks are you bottle neck not RAM or CPU. How many disks do you have in your cluster? Vs How many VM's? Note SQL is very very disk intensive.