Troubleshooting performance issues with mail server on VM

[truetaurus]

I have a VM with a mail server installed on a windows OS. But all of a sudden, the reponse times from my clients to the server has dropped significantly.

What could be causing this issue?
It could be to do with the network, storage, or resources but I am not sure what steps I could take to determine the fault

Would someone mind helping me with steps I could take to solve this?

Thanks

[truetaurus]

Any clues on this?

[a_p_]

Please provide some detail about the setup.

• What kind of hardware do you use (CPU, networking, ...)?
• Local or shared storage?
• In case of local storage, which disk type (SAS/SATA), disk speed, RIAD controller, BBU/BBWC cache, ...?
• Which Windows OS (2003/2008)?

If you are using local storage with a write-cache enabled RAID controller, check whether the battery is ok. Without a working battery the RAID controller usually switches back from write-back to write-through operation which can impact performance significantly.

André

[pesante_pr]

What kind of Exchange version are you running?   Also, have you checked the host performance, especially if this just started happening make sure there is no host contention.  Have new VMs been added to your environment?

[truetaurus]

Say I have a standard configuration, xeon processor with 4 cores, 1G network, share storage, and windows 2008.

But in general, what can I look out for or have a look into to determine the slowness?

[a_p_]

Som things you may want to take a look at are:

• networking - do all uplinks show the correct speed and duplex
• storage - any latencies accessing the storage (see logs on the storage system and/or the performance tab in the vSphere Client)
• update - have any updates been installed (host and/or VMs) before you experienced the performance issues
• new/modified VMs - have any new VMs been installed on the host or have any chenges been made (e.g. more vCPUs to any of the existing VMs)
• guest OS - any issues on the OS level, errors/warnings in the Windows Event logs

André

[pesante_pr · Accepted solution]

The below document page 20 and 21 has the exact counters you should be looking at the VM level.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/Exchange_2010_on_VMware_-_Best_Practices_Guide.pdf

These counters can be used for any VM not only exchange.  If you are familiar with ESXTOPs i consider that the best way to deep dive into diagnosing performanc issues.  Here is a link for those metrics also. 

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=100820...

This links leads you to http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9279 which has the descritpion on the stats.