Last weekend we moved our 2 Main File servers from Physical to VMs, we set up a 2 host cluster using Dell PowerEdge 2950s with Dual - Dual-Core Xeons, 16Gb Ram and Qlogic QLE2462 HBAs. The Host are ESX 3.5 Update 2 (Build 110268) will Vmotion, DRS and HA enabled.
The VMs are set with 2vCPU 2048mb RAM the OS is Windows 2003 R2 SP2 32bit, I created a seperate 40Gb VMFS SAN lun for each VM and formatted it as VMFS this holds a 15Gb vmdk for the C: drive. 1 file server holds the user home drives and the other is the departmental file server. The user file server has a 350Gb SAN Lun connected to the VM as an RDM and the departmental file server has a 600Gb and a 300Gb SAN luns again connected as RDMs.
the 2 40Gb VMFS volumes are available to both hosts as are the data volumes. We have tested Vmotion and it works fine.
These are the only 2 VMs currently on the cluster, 1 VM on each host.
The file servers are both performing fine however on the physical servers the CPU usage was a maximum of 5-10% in the VM it fluctuates wildly between 10 and 75% through out the day. does anyone have any ideas why this is? The Disk/Network/Memory stats are all similar to the Physical servers.
thanks
Sandy
