Greetings everyone, hopefully someone can help me on this one...
So we've been using VMware server for about 2 years now. We have had many Windows and Linux virtual machines running on a VMware Server 1.x (host OS is Windows 2003 Std. R2 x64). Every Windows VM we built has run without any performance problems, however, it seems that every Linux VM has significant performance problems.
Just last week we decided to start migrating to VMware's ESX 3.5. So we wanted to try running Linux VMs again to see if we have the same problem, and yes, we do! Very slow performance. Let me give you an example:
We have a DekiWiki VM strait from MindTouch (supposedly a certified VM). I installed it and it seemed to run fine for about an hour or so; the website loaded fine, SSH worked great, no problems. Then I come back later in the day and find that the website is loading VERY slow (about 1 minute for a full load). Then I'll try it again and sometimes it will not even load (Firefox says the server took too long to response), other times I'll try loading the site again and it will load instantly. Also I have noticed that when I log into SSH it will normally have a lag of about 5-10 seconds for any command I input. It will happen whether I have VMware tools installed or not.
Mind you this is all happening while I have 4 Windows VMs that run with absolutely NO performance problems, and our server is VERY under utilized (average about 20% CPU and RAM usage, it's a Dual Dual-core Xeon 2.66 GHz w/ 8 GB of RAM on a Supermicro Motherboard). When monitoring the performance of the VM there is hardly any CPU or RAM utilization, nothing that should make any computer run this horribly.
Regarding our network: I am on the same subnet as the server, so there's no firewall issues. We are using an HP ProCurve 2600 series switch. I have not yet seen any errors detected on the server's port by the switch.
I don't have all the details but we have seen the same results when we tried to setup a Plesk Linux VM: VERY slow performance when accessing the web pages, we tried numerous flavors of Linux: CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, and FreeBSD.
So I'm stumped, these performance problems seem to only happen to our Linux machine. Although we have had one machine that didn't have problems, it was a pre-built VM from CrashPlan.
Thanks for any help someone can provide.