With the release of VMware vSphere we, the administrators, now have the ability to run a virtual machine with up to eight virtual processors.  That sounds impressive, but in my opinion just because you can do something does not mean you should. I think from the overall performance of the host scaling out the application to smaller virtual machines is truly the way to go.  Case in point, while working with a client in the past I discovered they had more four processor virtual machines then they should running on the host.  Performance from the %ready had already affected the host and the client was not happy about the performance of the application.  I spent some time talking to them about the scheduling process, how it works and worked with the client to scale out the application to three one processor virtual machines working behind a loadbalancer. When it was all said and done the client was very happy about the performance in general and left then in a good place if they needed to scale out any further.

VMware did the same thing when they were testing Microsoft Exchange Server running in a virtual machine and by scaling out the Virtual Exchange environment outperformed the Physical Exchange Server. If you have not seen this whitepaper that VMware released you can find it here.

So my point is this.  To get the most performance from a VMware ESX Server try to see if you can scale out. VMware ESX server runs very well with smaller resourced virtual machines. 

That’s my two cents what yours?

vExpert, Virtual Machine, vmware, vSphere

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 10:53 am and is filed under Virtual Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.