VM guest extremely slow to reboot

[JonRoderick]

Need some help with this - this VM (in particular) is very slow to reboot (10-15 mins).

It's a 2003 SP1 guest with 4 vCPUS and 12GB RAM - it's running under ESX 3.5 U2.

Where should I start looking to see what is causing the problem - I'm thinking disk access as there's not much else going on during the boot sequence?

Cheers

Jon

[Yattong]

Hey,

I would start looking at the 4vCPU situation.

Why does this machine need 4vCPUs?

Do you understand that, 4 physical cores/procs must be simultaneously scheduled for that VM?

So if you have other VM's contending for CPU, then you may not have 4 cores available at the same time. Then this is the issue.

Have a look at the resource management guide to help you along.

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~y

[NTurnbull]

Think Yattong is right on the money here

Thanks,

Neil

[JonRoderick]

I'm aware of that but I also heard a while back that this is no longer a consideration - I can't find the document that mentions this - can anyone from VMware comment?

As an aside, I often see long reboot issues on UP Server 2008 VMs and on some UP XP guests too, so I'm not jumping to conclusions too quickly.

Cheers

Jon

[pdarcysgi]

I have just come across the same issue, I have a server that requires 4vCPUs and win2k3 SP2. The VM is patched to the latest microsoft patches and it takes an age to boot.

Interestingly enough if you just install Win2k3 SP2 without any further patches the VM boots in normal time?

Microsoft hits again.

[Yattong]

I'm aware of that but I also heard a while back that this is no longer a consideration - I can't find the document that mentions this - can anyone from VMware comment?

This is still how vCPUs work in ESX 3.x. even though it is relaxed slightly to increase performance, the concept is still the same.

From vmware's deppings blog, http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2008/07/07/multiple-virtual-cpu-vms/

http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2008/06/esx-scheduler-s.html

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-4960

As an aside, I often see long reboot issues on UP Server 2008 VMs and on some UP XP guests too, so I'm not jumping to conclusions too quickly.

Are you using limits / shares?

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~y

[JonRoderick]

Thanks, that must be what I read about.

Going to remove 2 vCPUs next week and see how things go.

Cheers.