Poor performance Windows 2008 R2 under ESX 3.5

[hellraiser]

Hi,

I've recently been building a few 2008 R2 VMs for use on our ESX 3.5 servers, these are highly specced Dell R710's with an abundance of both RAM and processing power. For some reason, they run like crap - this is, in part, not helped by the lack of a VMware video driver, however the issue I have been seeing is that the VMs have been maxing out the available RAM, resulting in them paging out to disk. I have disabled the balloon driver and this immediately frees up the consumed RAM and performance returns to a sensible level, but even then we get occasional stutters where performance slows considerably for a few seconds before continuing.

None of the VMs are doing anything particularly intensive, and it appears many people are having the same issues - I have built VMs with 1, 2 and 4 vCPUs and all behave in the same way. Surely vmware are aware of this problem, and have a solution? I'm running ESX 3.5 update 5, patched to build 213532.

Help!

JD

[hellraiser]

Well, at the risk of being cynical, I'd say we're unlikely to get one for ESX 3.5 as they are so keen on everyone moving onto vSphere - considering how much we've had to pay in penalty fees due to our cover expiring, it's a good earner for them

[softeislutscher]

so there is no solution to get the console more faster on esx 3.5?

or maybe just wait for the next updates?

[wiliwhitelaw]

I had an issue with very poor performance, I reduced the number of CPU's to 1 and found a dramatic improvement.

Could be worth a try.

Regards.

[chacho]

i hace some issues with ESX 3.4 U4 and WS 2008 R2. The first problem was the visual console freezing, but was semi-solved with the uninstallation of the video driver in the Guest OS, the other and bigger problem raises with the poor performance of the VM itself, when I monitor the resources usage in the VClient the VM is very low, nevertheless its performance is low almost all the time. I know I should migrate to Vsphere, a task that should be done shortly, but in the midtime I need a solution.

And by the other hand I feel myself disapointed with this. Please help me.

[Kryten67]

I discovered that the juddery mouse issue (which presents like the machine is tortured) was rectified in both 2003 and 2008 by going into the "troubleshooting" tab for the video driver and enabling "hardware acceleration" to "full".

This became a problem for me when I updated to the latest vSphere client (4.1.0) (I believe we previously were running 3.5 which did not have a problem with the juddery mouse).

[gmusumeci]

Definitely there is an issue running Windows 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 VM on ESX 3.5. We have several VMs running SQL Server, IIS, SharePoint and Project Servers. After lot of timeout issues, I decided to spend a couple of hours to research where the issue is. I saw the VM is using almost all memory and only 25MB of free memory is available. I started disabling all services (IIS, SharePoint, SQL, Antivirus) and rebooted server. Server still using around 3.8 GB of RAM of 4GB. After lot of troubleshooting, I rebooted on safe mode, and server was using 380 MB! Rebooted on safe mode with networking around 460 MB used!

Then I compared with others servers (1 VM and 1 physical server). Same issue on the VM, but physical server was using around 800MB of RAM. I decided to uninstall VM Tools and viola! Issue resolved.

Guillermo