Slow performance on HP Proliant ML350g5

[matarvai]

We had old HP Proliant ML310G3 with 1gb ram and two drives in RAID-1 and we run in that one old database software which is based on MS Access. Even with our old server we needed to use Terminal Services to get the software faster.

Now we bought HP Proliant ML350g5 with Quad-core prosessor 10gb ram and 8x146 10k SAS drives (RAID-10). We installed Esxi to new server on the only datastore and converted the old machine with vmware converter, and the software is REALLY slow now. It can take up to eight minutes just the get basic reports, which took about 40seconds with the old machine.

We have given 4cpu and 4gb ram to that single virtual machine, how can it be so slow? What would help. When looking Vmware console, or Windows Task manager, the cpu usage is below 10%. In console you will also see that disk usage is almost nothing.

What can we do to get the software faster in Esxi? Or should we just forget virtualization in this case? We wanted to get virtualization cause plan was to install Exchange also in the same hardware, but in different vm.

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

How many CPUs fo do you have in the new server? What operating system are you running in the VM? The first thing I would try is reduce the number of virtual CPUs in your VM down to one and see if that improves performance - I know it is counterintuitive but it has to do witth the way the vmkernel schedules the virtual cpus on the physical cores -

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[matarvai]

I modified my VM so instead of 4-cpu I only have one and software is really fast now. Report took 5 seconds to run. Thanks for your help!!

[weinstein5]

No problem - now for some shameless self promotion - do not forget tro ard points by mrking the answer correct -

[matarvai]

Hi again, We still are having couple times a day some performance issue with this configuration. It happens once or twice a day per user, and then reports will take couple minutes to show up on the screen. CPU usage, disc usage and these are idle at the time, but somehow software won't show these reports. This is minor issue now, but still it would be nice to fix. I am not sure is this issue now with Vmware esxi/Windows 2008 x64, or windows 2008 x64/MS Access, but if anyone has any ideas how come this is happening it would help.

[catalasan]

I have the same problem. It only affects ms-access. No solution yet up to this date. Anyone else having this problem?

[aliom]

Hi,

I have the same issues you had with ML 350 G5 Aand 32bit windows 2003 server. I have only assigned 2 cpu's and general performance isn't great. Did reducing your cpu's to 1 cpu really help performance that much?

Al

[DSTAVERT]

One issue is fairly common with performance complaints. The lack of a battery write back cache on the controllers and write back enabled in the controller bios.

[DSTAVERT]

CPU issues. If you have a number of VMs on an ESXi host and you have enabled multiple processors you may have issues with processor scheduling. If you have a VM with 2 processors it will need to wait until there are 2 processors available. The more VMs you have with multiple processors and the more VMs you have on a given host the more opportunity there is for processors to be unavailable.

[GregBradley]

The P400/256 in the ML370g5 makes a huge difference in ESXi with the RAM upgrade and BBWC making it a P400/512BBWC. My unit is using 5 146GB 10K disks in RAID5. A restart of Windows 2003 goes from 4 minutes to 20 seconds! My test of 15K disks in RAID1 showed little improvement.

[athi1234]

Yay, same issues here too. As far as I know it's a problem with MS Access, which slows down terribly in a VM. But I didn't find a working solution yet, so if anyone still has some ideas...