windows 2003 extreem slow boot

[verschijning]

Hi,

I'm running (in test) VMWare ESX 3.0.0. When (re)booting a host os it takes forever (10 minutes is no joke).

I'm running this on a Proliant DL360, dual Xeon (3 Ghz or so) and 2 GB memory.

There are currently running 2 systems with no load (test systems).

Can anybody advice?

[admin]

Firstly, I recommend you use 3.0.1. rather than 3.0.0, lots of bugs were fixed between releases.

Secondly, what storage are you running the VMs from? Local, iSCSI, NFS or SAN? Sounds to me like you have storage related performance issues, probably related to your setup.

[verschijning]

Local drive on SCSI Raid 0.

I have no problem when the os is started, everything then works as a bell.

[admin]

Hmm. Well I can tell you it's not normal for VMs to take so long to boot, in fact Win2003 VMs normally boot ridiculously fast.

So which part of the boot process takes ages? Does it sit on the Windows splash screen, or does it get into the GUI stick on the 'loading services' dialog box?

[verschijning]

Actualy the first part.

Where the nice processbar is displayed

[admin]

Try a Linux VM and see if it exhibits the same slow boot performance. Also try some large file copies, maybe some IOMeter tests, inside the Windows VMs to see if the disk performance is actually still poor but just not as obvious.

Check the vmkernel logs see if any disk timeouts are occuring, you can find them under /var/log, vmkernel and vmkwarning are the ones to look at.

I've seen cases where peoples RAID sets haven't built quite right, and this gives terrible disk performance, rebuilding the RAID array improved performance massively. A bit extreme maybe but if it's just test & dev kit it might be worth a go.

[cheeko]

Was this a physical to virtual migration?

Does booting in "Safe Mode" (press F8 before windows starts) takes that long as well?

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File copy was slow as well...

How can I check is RAID is ok? I mean HP say all is fine afcourse.

[verschijning]

No, a clean install from cd.

I'll try F8

[cheeko]

please see above post ...

[admin]

From past experience you can't tell, everything reports as fine, but performance is massively improved after rebuilding the RAID set.

[verschijning]

I will try a rebuilt

[juchestyle]

The last time this happened to me, the DNS settings were screwed up! Make sure you don't have a rogue dns or dhcp settings somewhere outside the normal scope. Then check the settings inside the vm. I feel very confident that you have wrong dns or dhcp or router settings somewhere.

Respectfully,

[adolopo]

Upgrade your VMFS3 version (Read: Migrate your sessions of the host and do a clean install). If you're running 3.0.0, there's a chance you could be running the (beta) VMFS3.

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After rebuilt, the boot is normal (2 minutes for progressbar screens). However copying files is still slow!

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Slow her means 5 minutes to copy 500Mb, while a normal server does it in 30 sec.

Both are connected on the same Gb network with Gb network cards.

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I Will first run all updates avalable for my version

[cheeko]

Are all VMs on this datastore slow or just one?

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Unfortunatly all (2 in total)

[wila]

Are you running both VMs at the same time ? 2 Gb host memory is a bit skinny so am wondering if you have a memory over commitment of some sort. It should be ok, but...