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Virtualization Quirks, Timeouts

As a preface, let me start by mentioning that its not about the software we have running in a virtual machine, or anything - everything is under very low stress and practically just for testing purposes, or development purposes. All stuff will be moved over to ESXI, in the mean time, we have two virtual machines - one on my personal desktop which I am doing some development on, and its for apache, mysql on windows xp so I can easily do some php development on it.

The other one being a vmware server running a virtual machine with sharepoint -

Both virtual servers have the same problem, but are on different machines -

Sometimes, for no apparent reason the virtual server times out - a quick refresh and its working immediately, so I may be using IE or firefox and load up the web server from either virtual machine, and it times out for just a snap - I refresh it, and bam, its back to normal

One is on birdged networking on my local work station.

Its not a big deal, and we have other production things running on other virtual machines that are in moderate use, these two were just test environments with little load, and it keeps timing out!

Any ideas? Is this normal, is there anything I can look out for -

Thanks

za_mkh

My experience with dormant VM's is that if they are accessed for the first time after a long period e.g. say you are the first person in the office in the morning is they seem to need to 'warm up'.
My take on this was due to the fact that VMWare probably 'cleared' out the memory/etc for the VM cause it wasn't being used, and now that you need it, VMWare starts firing up everything for that VM. After that, its ok for the whole day. I've seen this on a few of my VMs, Sharepoint, SQL, Web App Servers, etc. But normally with no adverse effect i.e. no timeouts.
My experience is based on ESX / ESXi Hosts.

mdeek

ASKER

Well, that I can even understand - but this is happening while we use the site, you get what I mean? Like i am on IE using sharepoint on a vm, and then in the next second when i click something, I have a connection issue - I refresh and bam! its working again :)

Kinda frustrating :)

Sas

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za_mkh

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larstr

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mdeek

ASKER

We are all on a LAN, and the computer host is running win 2008 server, with vmware server running a single guest on it the server it self is not used for anything, and the guest is just running sharepoint in a very low single user type set up.

its blazingly fast, just literally times out every so now and then for like a second maybe, and just has to be refreshed...

za_mkh

I would like to blame VMWare Server ... are you using VMWare Server 2?
I don't like VMWare Server 2 still prefer VM Server 1 :-}

mdeek

ASKER

Problem has been resolved by moving to ESXi 4