I recently upgraded one of our VMware Server hosts running Ubuntu and am having significant performance problems as a result.
I upgraded Ubuntu from 6.04 (server) to 7.10, so it's now on kernel 2.6.22-14-server. This is a dual-core Xeon box with 8Gb of RAM. I also upgraded VMware server from 1.0.3 to 1.0.5 while I was at it (using the VMware packages, not the deb files provided by canonical). All the virtual machines are stored on an XFS partition.
Before the uprage, we used to have anywhere from 5-10 virtual machines running at any given time, and unless there was significant activity on a couple of them, everything performed great. Now if I start more than a couple VMs, the load quickly rises to the 5/6 range and the entire system becomes unusable. Even with a single VM running, performance within the guest machine is noticeably slower than before.
At this point I can't really say if this is a problem with the host OS or VMware, so I'm hoping someone else has seen similar behavior. It almost seems like a problem with the filesystem performance, but iostat doesn't show anything out of the ordinary.
thanks for any help,
matt