We had a Win 2003 Std file server start to blue screen on us multiple times a week. Signs pointed to hardware issues, so we decided to P2V and get it virtualized before transferring data to a new VM 2008 R2 file server.
P2V went fine (slow, but fine... around 1 TB of data). After bringing it up on an ESXi 5 host (Dell PE R415 with (2) AMD Opteron 6 core processors, 32 GB RAM, (4) 3 TB SATA (yes, not SAS) drives in a RAID 10) it is giving us stuttering, even diminishing performance. Example... I'm trying to copy over a 3 GB PST file for a user. I've tried copying from this server to another server, to a USB drive, to the user's PC... no matter what I do the copy starts quick for a few seconds, then it slows... it can go from taking 2 minutes to over an hour, then it freezes for a while and goes nowhere... then comes back, then freezes. This has been happening in general with any connection or file update or transfer since the P2V.
The new 2008 R2 file sevrer on the same host (the only two VM guests on this ESXi host) runs great, even with only one processor and 4 GB RAM dedicated to it. Gig network connection for both, but the VM built from scratch runs great. I've cleaned up all hidden drivers, tried to tweak the 2003 server as much as possible. I'm going to update the BIOS and RAID controller (PERC H200) firmware on the Dell server this weekend, and that may help, but with one guest running fine and the other guest not, I don't expect that to fix the issue.
I'm thinking of moving the 2003 Server guest to a NAS or another host to see if it runs any better there. Can anyone think of anything else I can try?? Since the H200 RAID controller is an LSI card, I've been trying to get MegaRAID Manager installed to work with it and see if I can enable caching on the card, but again, I don't see that as being the issue here right now.
Thanks for any help!!!