Aloha,
I have the current setup:
Dell R420 w/ PERC H310 controller
32 gb RAM
1.8tb local storage, RAID 10 (4x7.2K SAS drives)
VMWare Essentials 5
There are only two VMs on this server. Both are Server 2008 R2.
I am having a problem with one of the VMs. It is running SQL 2005 SP4. Whenever I launch the application (Microsoft Dynamics RMS 2.0) that accesses the database in SQL 2005, CPU usage hits 100% and the application often freezes and times out. In the times that the app does not time out, I can access the data through the application without any problems (with the exception of running reports, which are slow and tax the CPU).
The VM is configured for 16gb RAM and 2 socket x 2 core processors (4 total processors).
The machine I migrated this database from is six years old, with 4 gigs of RAM, RAID 1 (mirrored drives) and a single processor. Performance is great :)
Can someone point out where I have a configuration problem/issue? I have ran esxtop and DAVG/rd/wr seldom exceed 15ms (same with GAVG/rd/wr). I initially thought it was a performance issue due to the 7.2K drives, but that doesn't seem to be the problem.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Apologies if I don't respond until Monday, it's almost the weekend (thankfully)
Many Thanks,
Tony
I scaled back the processor to a single socket. Horrible performance. Increased it to two sockets, same horrible performance. And this is just when the application is launched from the local server. CPU hits 100% and stays there until the application times out.
Once in the application, however, performance is quick (again, slowing down when a large report is ran).
I will read through the best practice guides. I have a hard time believing that anything in there will really improve performance. It could be this particular database (which was created before virtualization was mainstream). Or it can just be that this server just cant hack it. This is a 9gb database with no more than 10 concurrent connections at any given time. I am not a SQL expert by any stretch of the imagination, so there may be maintenance that can and should have been done to this database to increase performance, but as I stated before it is running great on the old server.
Just for fun I put this database on my laptop running Win 7 32 bit, 3gb ram Intel i5 processor. I installed SQL 2005. Performance was quick, both locally and accessing from a remote machine.
I am going to have to abandon the hypervisor on the new server, aren't I?