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awhit
Contributor
Contributor
‎09-10-2008 04:02 PM

Virtual Machines Boot Slow

Hi there,

We have 2 ESX servers (3.5 Update 2). Dual Quad Xeon Procs, with 12GB Memory. 4 NIC teams with VLAN Tagging.

I've just added a SQl server with 3GB memory.

There server performance is dreadful. It seems to take 3 times as long to install any application or even work within Windows. It's Storage sits on an EMC Clarion fiber connected. The Disks are on a vmfs datastore with no other virtual machines residing on that datastore.

I have tried vmotioning to the other ESX host, but the performance still seems bad. I have read that this could be a problem with oversubscribing the memory and it's causing the machine to page excessively.

So my question is: 1) is there anythign else that could be causing the slowness, and 2) What can I monitor to determine if the server is indeed hitting the swapfile excessively?

Thanks in Advance!

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awhit
Contributor
Contributor
‎09-10-2008 04:34 PM

I think I may have found the issue...

I was looking at the resource tab in the virtual machines properties and noticed that the virtual machine had a reservation of 0 and a limit for 300MB. It's probably hard to allocate 3GB memory to a machine that is limited to 300MB. Smiley Happy My assumption is that it was paging out the rest. Inside the virtual machine windows was using 2.7Gb of the page file.

I adjusted the memory limit to 3GB and adjusted the share level to Normal.

The server now boots in 1 minute opposed to 5-7 minutes.

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