Performance issues with the Virtual Machines

[brijeshm]

Hi

We have 2 HP DL 380 G6 Servers with Dual Quad core Xeon processor and 16 GB RAM each. The storage that we are using is Bufallo Terrastation.

We are running VMWare ESXi 4 with High Availablity Option & VSphere for 2 hosts.

The Guest OS are RHEL 2.4 Guest Machine, 2 running apache and 2 running Postgres.

We used to run the VM's on older version of VMWare with Older Hardware, the only difference was the Virtual machines were stored on the local harddrive of the server.

After the upgrade of the servers, the Virtual machines are stored on the NAS and mounted to the host using NFS.

The above solution was proposed by a consultant and after the upgrade, we are facing performance issues.

We are running 2 heavy traffic web servers on the VM's, and as the traffic on the sites increase, the VM's almost die. I have approached some companies to find a solution for this problem, and most of them pointed out that it could be because of the NAS. Upgrading to a SAN willl probably fix the problems

One of the Options that we have is

AP845A HP P2000 G3 MSA FC Dual Cntrl LFF Array ========> 1

AP858A HP P2000 300GB 6G SAS 15K 3.5in ENT HDD ========> 8

AP858A 0D ========> 8

221692-B22 HP 5m Multi-mode OM2 LC/LC FC Cable ========> 4

AK344A HP StorageWorks 81Q PCI-e FC HBA ========> 4

If any of the experts here could shed some light and advise if the HP SAN above is a good product to go with and advise on the problems we face. ?

Thanks In Advance

[AWo]

Welcome to the forums!

So you know for sure that the applications are using/generating high disk I/O's?

Please check also:

- that you do not have assigned too much vCPU's to the guests. Start with one vCPU!

- that you use at least NFS V3 and that the NFS export is set to asynchronous mode

AWo

VCP 3 & 4

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[brijeshm]

Thanks for your reply. Yes, i know for a fact that there is high I/O on the application.

Forgot to mention, the NAS is connected using a Cisco Gigabit Switch.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

I would investigate these problems using the free tools from Vkernel (StorageView, AppView, CapacityView) or the new free tools from Vizioncore. This way you can see exactly what is causing the issue.

I would also see if your terrastation is using Jumbo frames (MTU of 9000) and if you have set that up on the ESXi hosts.

If it is High IO then are you exceeding the 1Gbit link? Can you add more to the Terrastation?

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009, 2010

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