Question

Performance Issues when Running VMware Server 1.5 on Windows 2003 Enterprise Server.

Asked by: jimsus

HI,

I have an HP DL380 G4 Server.

The Server has 2x Duel Core Processors with 12GB of RAM.
I have 2x 72GB HDD set on Raid 1 with another 4x 300GB HDD set on Raid 5 with 64kb stripe size as default.

My Host OS is Windows 2003 Enterprise Server 32bit with SP2.

On this server I am running VMware server 1.5

(I had to modify my boot.ini file with / PAE as recommended in other posts to get my Enterprise server to see the full 12GB of RAM as initially it only recognised 3.5GB.)

I plan to run 30x Windows XP pro SP2 virtual machines in my server. These PCs are used only for very basic tasks within IE.
I have created each virtual machine with a 10GB fixed size HDD and have allocated 256MB of RAM to each machine.

I have a problem:

When I start up the first few virtual machines they run perfectly. However as I reach 15 /16 virtual machines runnind at the same time performance degrades. 25+ virtual machines running at the same time and its shot to bits, the virtual machines just lock up and are totally unusable.

Using Perfmon on the 2003 server when I have 25 virtual machines running (with terrible / unusable performance) I can confirm that my RAM is only 20 / 30% utilized, processor idle time is 90%  + and Disk idle time is also around 95% +.

I cant see a reason why my Host OS sees plenty of available system resources but yet the guest OSs are performing so badly.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

J


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Asked On
2008-05-12 at 11:31:10ID23395483
Tags

VMware

,

Server

,

1.5

,

Windows 2003 Enterprise

,

HP

,

DL380

,

G4

,

12Gb RAM

Topics

VMware

,

Windows 2003 Server

,

Microsoft Operating Systems

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
7

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Expert Comment

by: bhanukir7Posted on 2008-05-12 at 15:02:56ID: 21550861

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by: HalindarPosted on 2008-05-13 at 11:04:24ID: 21557602

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by: jimsusPosted on 2008-05-15 at 04:21:27ID: 21572334

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by: HalindarPosted on 2008-05-15 at 05:33:25ID: 21572759

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by: bhanukir7Posted on 2008-05-15 at 06:58:16ID: 21573675

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by: HalindarPosted on 2008-05-15 at 14:57:55ID: 21578311

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Assisted Solution

by: larstrPosted on 2008-05-23 at 04:13:38ID: 21630969

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