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David Marshall and Wade Reynolds write about 12 tips that can be used to improve guest server performance in your VMware ESX Server environment. This article is part one of three, and it discusses the following tips: Upgrade to VI3, Improve your host's processor and memory, Enhance your host's storage, and Optimize your host's networking.
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VMware ESX Server is one of the highest performing virtualization platforms on the market, but that does not mean that you don't have to optimize. In order to extract as much performance as is possible, you need to focus on three main areas.
First, the configuration of the ESX host server must be scrutinized at both the physical hardware layer and the virtualization platform layer. The decisions in this area will affect the performance of every virtual machine hosted on the ESX server. The second area of performance optimization is at the virtual machine layer with the various virtual hardware configuration options and factors. The third and final area is the configuration of the guest operating systems running inside the virtual machines.
In this three-part article, we'll list twelve top tips that can boost the performance of your virtual environment in all three of these areas. We'll cover everything from upgrades to remote access to configuration tweaks. Are you ready? Let's get started.
Tip 1: Upgrade to VI3
If you are still running VMware ESX Server 2.x, you ought to know that the new VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) could bring significant performance improvements. That's not to mention major scalability, usability and hardware compatibility enhancements. Upgrading your ESX 2.x hosts and virtual machines to VI3 (using ESX 3.0.1) could bring performance improvements straight out of the box.
VMware has optimized several subcomponents of ESX Server in version 3. In particular, you can expect faster handling of page faults, context switches and memory management unit operations within virtual machines. Virtual machines can now use Physical Address Extensions (PAE) to access up to 16 GB, more than the previous limit of 3.6GB of RAM, without taking a severe performance hit.
Virtual networking within ESX 3.0 has been improved, both in the vmxnet virtual network adapter and in VM-to-VM networking. VMFS3 is a new version of the VMFS family of file systems that offers enhanced performance and scalability. Virtual machines are less dependent upon the Service Console, and their user-level virtualization components can now run on any available processor core. According to VMware, this also allows ESX 3.0 to scale up to 50% more virtual machines per host over ESX 2.5.
ESX 3.0 can use the ACPI power saving mode for better handling of idle virtual machines. Virtual machines can take advantage of up to four virtual processors. Other features in VI3 that also enhance performance and scalability are the distributed resource scheduler (DRS), resource pools, high availability (HA) and VMware Consolidated Backup. ESX 3.0 hosts can now support up to 20 physical network adapters.
If you do nothing else, look into upgrading to VI3. The difference is akin to jumping from Windows NT Server 4.0 to Windows Server 2003.
Click here to read all of part one of this three part article.