Anybody familiar with VMWare tuning?

[Brian Karas]

Thanks for all the good comments so far.  Some additional info:

Host machine has 9GB RAM, and running Vmware Server.
All the windows guests has the vmware tools installed and the windows
eye-candy stuff turned off or down
Windows swap files are set to use 512MB-1GB of disk
SQL Server host has 2 cpus and just under 4GB RAM (32 bit)
IIS Host has 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM
When I say it feels slower, I mean that page loads, copying files, or just
interacting with Remote Desktop seems to be way noticeably slow.  Not just
like a slight lag, but it feels as if the machines are running under a 60%
processor load kind of slow.
Click....wait....window...opens....and....fills....in....


On 1/22/08 9:32 AM, "Jarod Wilson" <jarod at wilsonet.com> wrote:

> On Tuesday 22 January 2008 08:52:11 am Brian Karas wrote:
>> I've got a couple of windows guests (SQL Server and IIS) running on a
>> fairly beefy CentOS box (64 bit, dual quad-core, Dell 2950 I think).
>> Everything just seems way slower than it should.
>> 
>> I don't have enough experience to really dig into it.  If anyone has any
>> suggestions/tips/ideas/etc it would be much appreciated.  I'd like to
>> figure out the best way to allocate resources to get a fairly decent
>> response time and stability.
> 
> I kid you not, but it is actually recommended to oversubscribe the crap out of
> memory allocation on Windows guests if your host OS is Linux. Windows is
> grossly inefficient when it comes to swap, and even more so when running as a
> guest OS, due to the amount of trapping and emulating required to swap.
> Oversubscribe your Windows guest memory allocation, and if/when the host runs
> out of physical memory, the swapping will be done on the Linux side, rather
> than letting Windows swap.