ESXi perforamce in general

[TECH198]

EVferytime i run VM's in ESXi in Fusion, regardless of installed OS. there is a massive performnace hit, and i'm trying to understand why..

I have 16 Mac , and VMWare Fusion itself (running ESXi ) has 8Gig.. I've even tried pushed it up to 12 Gig, and even with 2 VM's servers on ESXi, performance is so dam slow.. Remote desktop and GUI web browser..

On comparison, running these OS's on VMWare fusion itself separately is faster... I've done an ESXTOP to see performance hit, and all look fine to me. Resources in ESxi CPU is 50% while memory is 30% or under, which also good.

But i still get performance hit. Obviously 2 VM's at since hits it hard (graph always hits 90% or above), but even running Windows Server 2008 R2 with 4Gig is slow .....(aka. 12 Gig to ESXi, and each server running has 4 gig), while technically, they don't actually use the entire 4Gig.. but its available for use (if needed). Mac has a dual core i5 1,.7Ghz so perhaps that is why... But still that wouldn't explain why they run "faster" standalone without ESxi and just under VMware Fusion with the same memory requirements..

Windows XP with latest SP, same deal. I still haven't figured this out yet. but its got to be somewhere.

[scott28tt]

So nested VMs run worse than native VMs?

I would have expected that - you have extra layers of code between your workloads and the physical resources.

[vbondzio]

I'd say this is a far shot away from "ESXi performance in general", it is very specifically workload performance in nested ESXi on VMware Fusion, most likely on a severely under-powered CPU.

Nesting ESXi or any other hypervisor for that matter (with the exception of Hyper-V for the sole purpose of VBS) is very much unsupported, so you won't be able to get any official help on the matter. The process to identify the bottleneck here would most likely require Fusion level stats vmx logs from the ESXi VM and stats vmx from one of the nested VMs (assuming that it isn't user / configuration issues anywhere).

Your best bet would be to get a separate home lab that runs ESXi if you want something performant, if you want to retain the option of running MacOS, maybe a 2018 or later Mac Mini.

What is the exact ID / model identifier of your "16 Mac"? What is the version / build of Fusion / ESXi?

Also, can you post a screenshot of the main esxtop cpu view with one of the nested VMs GID expanded ("e")?