we run several windows servers and windows clients on our vmware esx. One of the Windows 2003 Servers is a build-server with major HDD-reads/writes. as it is our build server.
This machine was a hardware before and was virtualized to the ESX. Is there any way to increase the HDD-Performance? Perhaps there are special windows (guest) drivers? The files are stored on a Raid6 base.
Performance graph of vmware infrastructure client shows reads up to 650 KBps and writes up to 4000 KBps.
Thank you. Regards, Uwe
If you have the latest VMTools on there then there's little within the guest you can do but if you can move its data to a faster (RAID10?) array you should see some significant speedup over the RAID6 setup you have now. You also shouldn't write off a V2P conversion, some people seem shocked at the thought but it really is the only route for certain classes of server usage.
Edit - oh and you could always consider moving to V4 if you're on V3.5, it really is that much quicker.
Making sure that the virtual disks aren't sharing a lot of physical disks could help, too :)
And to second @Chopper3, sometimes physical is better.
You might also look at using non-virtual drives for that particular server and giving them direct drive access instead.
ESX 4.x have a new paravirtualized SCSI controller called "VMware Paravirtual". I never tried it on Windows but on Linux it gives a significant io bust. You can give it a try and let us know if it helps.
I also had this problem when first diving into ESXi some years ago. Two factors seriously impacted performance:
BBWC was the big one. On ProLiant servers with Smart Array cards, adding a battery backup (
Partition alignment was good for a ~15% performance boost on sequential I/O. Random was not really affected. VMWare's white paper shows similar results in a controlled environment.