ESXI 4.0 Slow Guest OS

[hardywang]

Hi all,

I have a PC with 4GB memory, I installed ESXI 4.0 and then installed 2 Windows 2008 Servers (for testing purpose). I allocate 2GB memory for my first one and 3 GB for my second one.

After I installed all servers and applications, it worked fine for a while -- both 2008 are functional (not very fast because of memory limitation, but with reasonable speed). But recently something strange happened, my second 2008 will turn to extremely slow to respond after running for a while. I shut down both 2008 and restart again, first one always works fine, but second one is still slow. If I shut down both 2008 and ESXI server physically, restart everything the second one runs well for a while and becomes extremely slow again -- no harddisk activity (memory swap?).It gives the feeling that ESXI host lost the memory allocated to my second guest OS, maybe I am wrong.

What is the proper procedure to trouble shooting the issue? I am no expoert of VMWare, but OK with Windows.

Thanks

Hardy

[Dave_Mishchenko]

I'd start on the performance tab of the vSphere client. Select your host and then click on the Performance tab. Click on chart options and then select the memory counters. Take a look at the amount of swap being used.

Also check out this link for freeing up some more memory for VM use - http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/memory_allocation.php.




Dave

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[hardywang]

Thanks, I followed your instruction to re-config ESXi, and I will keep an eye on it to see does it work.

Buy the way, I am still not very clear about something

Host memory -- is it the memory used by ESXi to do its own job?

Guest Memory -- I think it is the memory used by guest OS.

Balloon -- what is it?

Active -- what is it?

Granted -- what is it?

Consumed -- by host or by guest?

Thanks

Hardy

[hardywang]

After running with new configuration for several days, I had same problem again... extremely slow guest OS response.

Anybody can give me a hint where is the starting point to investigate?

I click on "Resource Allocation" of this guest OS and saw:

Host Memory

- 3216MB max

- 2.17GB Consumed

Guest Memory

- 3072MB max

- 504MB Consumed

Does it sound correct?

Thanks

Hardy

[hardywang]

Anybody has comments?

[athlon_crazy]

What would happen when you let only second VM 2008 running while turn off the first one? Any performance gain on second VM?

vcbMC-1.0.6 Beta

vcbMC-1.0.7 Lite

[hardywang]

I could have a try, but not sure how much help it will be, because I run my first VM as application server and second one as DB server.

The thing I don't really understand is that when my 2nd VM turns to be extremely slow and I brutely shut down power of that VM (I think by that time all memory for 2nd one should be released), then I restart my 2nd VM and it is still extremely slow, even to reboot and takes forever. It gives me the impression that memory management has something wrong.

If I physically restart the host machine, both VM are not too slow to load...