I just setup a VMWare Server Solution with a brand new Dell PE 2850, dual Xeon CPU, RAID 5 SAS drives, and 4GB of RAM.
I have two VM's, both Win2k3 SP2, the host is Win2k3 Sp2 as well. One VM is SBS 2k3, and the other is Win2k3 Terminal Services.
We have an Access DB that is pretty CPU intensive at times. We are running this DB in Terminal Service and we notice the proc. usage goes up around 30-60% while doing certain activities in the Access DB. We have had to quit using the DB on the virtualized Terminal Server as it actually runs better on an old P4 when running it locally. Kinda sucks as this was one of the big points of this project. We have put the access db on the c partition of the Terminal server and it still bogs down. It definitely appears to be a CPU issue. I initially started the TS VM with only a single proc.. I then tried allocating another cpu. Windows picked up the 2nd proc., but it still ran the same. I also set the vm's to allocate all ram at startup.
Does anyone have an idea why a P4 would run an access db better than a VM with access to a Xeon processor? It's very apparent that we are not taking advantage of the full horsepower of the Xeon when using a VM.
Any ideas appreciated!!