I have just recently installed an Ubuntu host running VMware Server v1.0.3. The host has 5GB of RAM and two Xeon 2.40GHz CPUs.
There are only two VMs on the host, both of them a result of P2V of the physical machines they were on. One VM is an SBS2003, and also does their backups (Veritas). The other server is Windows 2003 server and does file sharing and backup Domain Controller duties.
The users have been complaining of the network being "unuseable", with particular regards to retrieving Outlook data and opening files from the network: it used to be quite fast and instantaneous when the VMs were on physical machines, but now take quite a bit longer (e.g., search for a contact in Outlook that used to take 2-3 seconds now takes 12-15 seconds, maybe more)
I have another thread open that is dealing with sustained high load I am seeing on the host (2.50+), but I am not sure if this is related.
I did some file transfers tests of a 20MB file back and forth from my Linux laptop to each of the VMs.
One of the VMs consistently transfers at about 3MB/s (yes, MegaBYTE), which translates to about 100Mbits/sec.
The other VM consistently transfers at about 5MB/s (or about 40Mbit/sec))
The host has a Gbit NIC and is connected to a Gbit port. The switch indicates it is connected at 1000FD
I have VMware-tools installed, and the NIC driver on the guest says it is using the "vmxnet" driver. I have not yet tried using the "e1000" driver, but I am almost certain it won't make a difference (will try it anyway, just to say that I did)
As mentioned earlier the high load issues I made reference to may be seperate from the networking one, but there is definately something wrong here.
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated, and of course, please let me know if you need any further information from me.
-Alan M.