Hi there!
I'm running 2 VMs on VMware Server 1.0.4, which in turn is running on a Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 32 bit, all patches and SPs. One VM is Windows Server 2003 SP2, the other Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2, both have the latest VMware Tools installed.
Problem description:
o The VMs have a very slow performance but not permanently. Everything is super-slow, even opening the Start Menu. Sometimes the VMs freeze for some minutes. Booting one of them up takes up to 10 minutes most of the times (not always).
o Sometimes the VMs seem to be catching up, that means, the updating of the graph in taskmgr.exe is like 5 Hz instead of the usual 1 Hz. Also the progress bar of the Windows-VGA-boot-screen is sometimes for a few seconds speeding up much (going faster than normal).
o Disk speed as well as network speed itself is okay, I can copy a 250 MiB Service Pack from a network location to the virtualized disk at 16 MiB/s. However, decompressing the Service Pack on the virtualized disk takes an hour, where on the host itself it would take less than 4 minutes.
o Enough RAM is available too. Despite the VM being very slow, the CPU utilization seen in taskmgr.exe both on the host and inside the VMs is always below 30%.
o One of the VMs originally ran on a P4 host much faster (the host had less RAM, frequency, HDD speed, NIC speed).
o I also started the VMs in VMware Player on the same WSS 2k3 host, same issues.
o Before I tried it using VMware Server 1.0.3, same issues.
The hardware of the underlying host:
o Pentium D 930 Dual-Core Processor @ 3 Ghz (»Presler«)
o Intel Server Mainboard (SE7230NH1)
o 3 GiB of RAM
o The VMs are hosted on an NTFS-Partition on a RAID-1 consisting of 2x 500 GB 7200 RPM Hitachi HDDs.
o The host system in general seems to be very fast, both in response time and in transfer speed (target of the D2D backup).
Measures I already tried, but without improvement:
o Disable EIST (Enhanced Intel SpeedStep) in the BIOS. No improvement. CPU-Z shows the host CPU changing frequency between 2,3 and 2,99 GHz all the time, however Speedswitch XP shows the host CPU always at 2,99 GHz, regardless of the BIOS setting. Is there any way to disable SpeedStep on the software level of W2k3, in case the BIOS setting doesn't work? Is there any more reliable tool to determine, if SpeedStep is active?
o Use different HDD to host VMs.
o Change the memory allocation of the VMs and assigning permanent non-swapped RAM.
o Adding these setting in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Server\config.ini:
host.cpukHz = "2990000"
host.noTSC = "TRUE"
ptsc.noTSC = "TRUE"
o Adding these setting in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Server\config.ini:
host.cpukHz = "2000000"
host.noTSC = "TRUE"
ptsc.noTSC = "TRUE"
o Enable time synchronization between the virtual machine and the host operating system.
o There is no option to enable Intel VT in the BIOS (latest release), although the CPU supports it.
o Add physical RAM on the host (originally 1 GiB, enough for one VM, now 3 GiB for two VMs).
I'm in despair! :_| Does anybody have suggestions? Thanks in advance!
asklucas