VMware Server slower then cold molasses?

[InlineFive]

Hi all,

I was pretty excited to give VMware Server a try so yesterday I pulled out an old box (1.7Ghz Celeron, 512MB, 80GB) and installed VMware Server on top of CentOS 4.3 (no GUI, about 80MB of memory used).

Whenever I try to run ONE virtual machine, say Windows XP Pro scrolling through the menus the processor on the host machine always pegs at 100% because of that VM. And responsiveness is horrible.

I've looked around on the VMNET community forums and modified a lot of memory options but still no effect.

I must say that I'm annoyed after hearing all this great stuff about them.

Oh well, off to try Virtual Server 2005...

I5

 

[MrChad]

Did you install VMWare Tools? How much memory did you allocate to the VM?

 

[InlineFive]

I did install VMWare Tools and it currently has 256MB of memory. I think it's something with the software because VirtualPC with three VMs open never ran this slowly.

 

[n0cmonkey]

It runs fine on my work machine...

 

[stash]

Are you trying to use the two processor support?

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: stash
Are you trying to use the two processor support?

I don't understand, the processor (as you well know) is single core and all of the VMs are setup as one processor (even though I could select two).

Should I disable SMP on the host system even though it doesn't work?

 

[MrChad]

I'm not familiar with the Linux version of VMWare, but I have run XP guests in VMWare Player with an XP host machine with little performance issues. VMWare does run better with more RAM installed, but your issue seems to be with the CPU pegging (am I correct? or are there other issues?)

Does your CPU peg just in certain situations? What HAL is your XP machine using? Does your host have ACPI support enabled?

 

[stash]

Originally posted by: InlineFive

Originally posted by: stash
Are you trying to use the two processor support?

I don't understand, the processor (as you well know) is single core and all of the VMs are setup as one processor (even though I could select two).

Should I disable SMP on the host system even though it doesn't work?

Nope, you're fine. I've seen people try to enable two processor support with only one CPU in the host (or one dual core or HT CPU), and that will cause major slowdowns.

 

[InlineFive]

Okay, I just installed the Management Web UI and it looks like another Linux based VM, Astaro, is eating up tons of resources when it didn't look like it was doing anything with the viewer. And there is a process on the host system that is using up about 15% of the processor. Looks like I just stuck my foot in my mouth earlier.

Although I do agree that part of the problem is (1) the Celeron and (2) the memory. Particularly because it is noticeably faster with one VM running. Hopefully I can afford migrate this to a Barton with 1-2GB of memory soon.

And on a side note, is there an easy Bash command to view all of the processes and their resources?

 

[Nothinman]

I think it's something with the software because VirtualPC with three VMs open never ran this slowly.

VMWare on Linux runs tons better than VMWare on Windows, there's something else wrong with your setup. I can run 2-3 VMs on my dual 1.2Ghz 1G machine without too much of a problem.

And on a side note, is there an easy Bash command to view all of the processes and their resources?

As root if you type 'top' it'll print the top processes sort by CPU usage by default. If you want to sort by memory hit M and if you want to go back to CPU hit P and if you want to change the refresh interval hit s. There's a lot more to it than that, but it should get you started.

 

[Brazen]

I have Virtual Server on a 1 Ghz Celeron with 512 Ram and had two linux LAMP servers and a Windows XP machine running within virtual machines. The two LAMP servers where for testing so weren't really accessed accept by me, but they could both be powered on and running and the Windows XP console still ran pretty much as it would on bare metal with a 1Ghz Celeron.

 

[stash]

I can run 2-3 VMs on my dual 1.2Ghz 1G machine without too much of a problem.

That's it?

 

[InlineFive]

Okay, it turns out that the Astaro has a glitch with VMWare where it will use up 50% idling. So that is the problem as now that I can watch the Windows XP Professional idles at 2%.

In any case, I've been having second thoughts about my primary firewall being on a VM so it will all work out.

Thanks for your help everyone.

 

[Nothinman]

I can run 2-3 VMs on my dual 1.2Ghz 1G machine without too much of a problem.

I don't have much of a reason to run any more, most of the time I don't have a real reason to run any. And since I generally give each VM 256M of memory running 3 of them only leaves 256M for the host OS.

And it's more than I can run in VMWare on Windows, on there 1 VM + all of my other stuff gets the thing paging like mad.

 

[stash]

Huh. I've got 3 VMs running on a server 2003 box at the moment, and they're using less than 500 MB RAM. Each is allocated 384 MB.

Obviously there is paging going on, and the memory usage goes up when the VMs are under load, but the performance is still very acceptable. Although my system has more than double the CPU clock speed of yours and probably a faster drive, so that might have something to do with it

I do have to say that I like VMWare Server a lot better than MS Virtual Server. Performance-wise, they're both fine for my purposes, but MS VS's UI is atrocious. Of course I'm preaching to the choir here

 

[unmerited]

I have to say I really like VMWare Server. I have it running on a Suse linux 9.3 host with an xp2400+ and 1G ram. I can have 2 guests (W2K and Solaris) running with very little performance degradation. Great for testing out another OS and system software.


unmerited

 

[Nothinman]

Obviously there is paging going on, and the memory usage goes up when the VMs are under load, but the performance is still very acceptable

Depends on your idea of acceptable. Sure if I run several VMs I expect some paging to go on, but if I run 1 or 2 in Linux there is virtually no additional paging outside of the additional load put on by the VM wanting to read/write to it's virtual disks. But on Windows starting one VM causes all kinds of extra crap like applications being pushed out of memory for no good reason. I have no good way to know why Windows does this, but it seems that since XP it favors the filesystem cache way too much and it causes interactivity to suffer. Yes it's usable, but it's not what I would call good.

 

[willtriv]

the simple linux commands you should know before using linux:
df
ls (-la)
ch*
free
top
mv,rm,cp, ln
ps (-ax)

these kind of things will allow you to do the basic things ps -ax will show you list of processes with memory % and cpu time.
top give you a live update sorted in order of cpu% cosumption.

I hope this helps as it seems most ppl just got into a cock measuring contest about how awesome their server is
My server is undoubtably the worst
1600mhz sempron 256mb ram +40gb hdd
it runs a cs server, a proxy, apache, subversion, mysql, postgres, my msn (in console via ssh) and about 10 other major things ive forgotten. I think your cele should be just pimping vmware right along. If you find that its still sluggish I may be able to tweak system problems but im sorta a noob when it comes to vmware.

 

[willtriv]

oh, forgot these
kill (pid) kills a process based on pid number seen in ps -ax or top
and
killall processname kills any pid's based on this processname. This can help you kill things running that are eating cpu

maybe not the best way of shutting them down but itll work
for a real shutdown of a server/service
/etc/init.d/processname stop/start/restart is the typical layout