Aidan Ryan's questions

We have an ASP.NET MVC site hosted on two VMware ESX hosts. Each host has two sockets with quad core CPUs (8 logical cores per host). We have two VMs on each host. Initially, only one vCPU was allocated to each host.

We increased the vCPUs per host to 2, and then 4, and at each stage have measured an average of 30% throughput increase in our load testing. The application is CPU-bound - there is not much caching (RAM) and very little disk activity.

I am wondering if we should expect different results if we have more VMs with fewer CPUs. I've been reading a bit about how ESX schedules vCPUs and it appears that with more vCPUs and fewer VMs, the scheduling overhead may be holding us back.

Should we go with, for example, 4 VMs with 2 vCPUs? Exactly what resource bottlenecks are we trading by adjusting VM count versus vCPU count?

Is it possible to backup a SQL Server database directly to CD-RW?

We have a vCenter 4.0 Server with two ESX 4.0 hosts. We have a vCenter Server 4 Foundation license and a vSphere 4 Advanced 6CPU license. Licenses have been assigned to the server and hosts (each host has two CPUs leaving 2 unassigned on the vSphere license.)

The licenses are applied successfully via the vCenter license management interface, then moments later each host displays the following error on the Summary page:

Configuration Issues License assignment on the host fails. Reasons: The license key can not be assigned.

What causes this error and how can it be resolved?

I have a PERC 5/i RAID controller currently hosting two drives in RAID 1. I am about to add a third drive in "direct" mode, just a normal physical volume.

Would performance be better if the drive is attached to the motherboard's controller or to the RAID controller? A co-worker suggested that the RAID controller's caching might provide better perf even with a single drive.

Task Manager shows the overall memory usage of svchost.exe. Is there a way to view the memory usage of individual services?

Note this is similar to Finegrained performance reporting on svchost.exe

It seems to me that since RAID volumes are logical (as opposed to physical), the layout that the OS believes they have might not correspond to the actual phsyical layout.

So does defrag make sense for RAID?