Disk performance in VMWare: Mistress note
I want to share with readers the results of many hours of torment with the performance of VMWare. First the result, then the lyrics:
OS: Windows 2003 Server
VMWare 6.5 (probably other versions) with large volumes of disk operations (server applications) starts to slow down (tens of times) after active use for several hours. And this is not fragmentation.
Decision:
In the .vmx virtual machine description file, we add:
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MemTrimRate can be configured via GUI, Options-> Advanced-> Disable memory page trimming
After that, everything starts working in accordance with the expectations (fly :-)).
A few words about the process:
It was assumed that on the server itself - NAT, DNS, DHCP
In the first virtual server there is a WSUS server: an Internet account through which only updates from Microsoft can be uploaded by agreement with the provider.
In the 2nd and 3rd - a proxy server to other networks (due to different networks, it’s not possible to place everything in 1 system).
A few hours after the start of the initial boot of WSUS, there was a noticeable sharp drop in performance, and the virtual machine restart took up to 10-15 minutes.
I didn’t think that I thought in Head-less (without a video card) VMWare mode starts to slow down, or I think it starts to slow down through RDC ... It turned out that VMWare by default cleverly works with memory - dynamically allocates memory to virtual machines, and separately deals with swap. Everything adds up to such problems.
Ps. Yes, if you have a Windows 2003 server and above, error checking is disabled in the BIOS, the server will load and work normally without a video card, you do not need to configure anything further. Access to the GUI via RDC remains. But installing an OS without a video card is not so trivial :-)
OS: Windows 2003 Server
VMWare 6.5 (probably other versions) with large volumes of disk operations (server applications) starts to slow down (tens of times) after active use for several hours. And this is not fragmentation.
Decision:
In the .vmx virtual machine description file, we add:
')
MemTrimRate = "0"
sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"
MemTrimRate can be configured via GUI, Options-> Advanced-> Disable memory page trimming
After that, everything starts working in accordance with the expectations (fly :-)).
A few words about the process:
It was assumed that on the server itself - NAT, DNS, DHCP
In the first virtual server there is a WSUS server: an Internet account through which only updates from Microsoft can be uploaded by agreement with the provider.
In the 2nd and 3rd - a proxy server to other networks (due to different networks, it’s not possible to place everything in 1 system).
A few hours after the start of the initial boot of WSUS, there was a noticeable sharp drop in performance, and the virtual machine restart took up to 10-15 minutes.
I didn’t think that I thought in Head-less (without a video card) VMWare mode starts to slow down, or I think it starts to slow down through RDC ... It turned out that VMWare by default cleverly works with memory - dynamically allocates memory to virtual machines, and separately deals with swap. Everything adds up to such problems.
Ps. Yes, if you have a Windows 2003 server and above, error checking is disabled in the BIOS, the server will load and work normally without a video card, you do not need to configure anything further. Access to the GUI via RDC remains. But installing an OS without a video card is not so trivial :-)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/57637/
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