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Dberg201110141
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performance of Win 2003 R2 in ESXi 4.1

Hi! This is my first post.

I´m new to vmware, just started out with it, have been reading some guides. It's a really nice product so far 😃

The server that i´m using is a Dell Poweredge 2800, which I know is getting a bit old.

It has 6 GB of ram, and running Raid 5 with a perc controller. 1CPU Intel Xeon 3.0 ghz.

I have created 1 vm, running Win 2003 R2 with the "typical settings" and added 4 gb of ram and 2 vCPUs, im experiencing the vm to be a little slow.

The vm is using LSI logic for storage, the vm is stored on Raid of the Poweredge.

At first rebooting the server was really slow, after some time on google , sched.mem.pshare.enable = fasle solved it.

Have I missed something in the configuration ?

Or is it just that my CPU doesnt support intel vt ?

Any ideas will be greatly appreciated 😃

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AndreTheGiant
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You hardware is very old and performance could not be good.

How many CPU do you have?

IF you have only one (as you have written), you must have a "dual core" CPU to give 2 vCPU.

Try to use a single vCPU to make the scheduler work better.

Or try to use ESXi 3.5 that require a little less resources than 4.1

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro

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a_p_
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Welcome to the Community,

even though tweaking some settings may help, I assume one of the reasons for this could be the RAID configuration. How many disks do you have in your RAID5 set (e.g. 3 disks is one of the slowest configurations for RAID5) and does the RAID controller have BBU (battery backed cache) to be able to operate in write-back mode (this makes a HUGE difference)?

André

Dberg201110141
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Yes its a set of 3 disks, with 1 hotspare, You think this might be it ? Maybe I should create an array of 4 disks instead ?

The controller has BBU and operates in write-back mode, just checked Smiley Happy

Thanks.

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AndreTheGiant
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You hardware is very old and performance could not be good.

How many CPU do you have?

IF you have only one (as you have written), you must have a "dual core" CPU to give 2 vCPU.

Try to use a single vCPU to make the scheduler work better.

Or try to use ESXi 3.5 that require a little less resources than 4.1

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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Dberg201110141
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Here´s an update,

I got 2 more drives and created a Raid 1 array for the ESXi installation. Created a raid 5 array of 4 disks for the VMs. This had some effect, a little faster but not much. The Raid controller is configured for write-back.

The CPU is a singel Intel Xeon 3.0 Ghz, with hyperthreading, presenting "2 cores". I removed 1 vCPU from the Win 2003 leaving it with 1 vCPU, this made a lot of differance, performance increased a lot.

Thanks  André & Andre  😃 Very helpful answers!

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