Question

Virtual Machine disk writes very slow

Asked by: Theodosios

Hi Everyone,

I have 3 servers running as virtual machines (VMWARE Workstation 6.5).  One is a 2003 SBS server, and the other 2 are Win XP.  They're all around 250GB each, with 1GB RAM, and they reside on a Windows 2003 (32-bit) host.  Mem and CPU usage are pretty low.

All 3 virtual machines are incredibly slow when copying files to them.  Copying files to the host is no problem.  I tried breaking them up into 2GB partitions, and that did nothing.  I know on Linux hosts, there's an option to disable write caching, which apprently helps, but I don't  see this avaiable for Windows installs.

Any idea what I can try next?

Thanks in advance,
Theo

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Asked On
2009-08-10 at 11:30:16ID24640908
Topics

Virtualization

,

VMware

,

Operating Systems Miscellaneous

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
3

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Answers

 

by: ryder0707Posted on 2009-08-10 at 11:38:55ID: 25062650

How big of files you are trying to copy? just bear in mind even if you split them but if everything is sitting on the same disks, the disk has lots of writing to do so you have a bottlenect issue here, you may want to run perfmon in the win2k3 to capture disk stats during copy
refer to link on what to capture for disk related counters http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Windows-Server-2003-Performance-Tuning.html
if disk is your problem you may want to get dedicated disk for each vm, for better io performance

 

by: TheodosiosPosted on 2009-08-10 at 11:48:23ID: 25062748

The files are typically several GBs in size.

I had the same problem even when just 1 virtual machine existed on this same host.

Thanks,
Theo

 

by: ryder0707Posted on 2009-08-10 at 18:29:10ID: 25065558

Yeah GB is quite big to copy within the same disk as the disk needs to read and buffer in memory then write ouput to disk
this is actually reading and writing to the same disk, bear in mind, the output is actually being written to single vmdk file
the vmware workstation is doing a lot of processing at the same time as it needs to send instruction to the OS before can instruct the disk read/write, you will experience the same issue with vmware server or microsoft virtual server
again, i'm suggesting this is a bottleneck issue at your disk
cheers!

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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