Vmware Performance

I posted yesterday that I was seeing a huge amount of storage traffic on my View Manager box. Turns out that it was due to two things: a snapshot and vswp.

This morning I checked a few settings before proceeding. According to VCenter, the view manager box only had 600meg of ram allocated, but task manager on that windows 2k3 showed 2.9Gig in use and committed, mainly pagefile. Strange, why the disconnect between the two?

It turns out that when the resource pool was created for the view manager server, the reservations were never changed.  The pool had a default memory reservation of 600meg. (all set by someone else I might add). So in looking at the pool, the ESX host was only giving the view manager server 600 meg of physical ram, and was using a vswp file to make up for the rest of the 2gig allocation.

I shut the server down, removed it from the resource pool, set the reservation on the pool higher, put the server back in then set a reservation on the server itself that matched it’s allocated physical ram.

At the same time, in Vcenter I deleted the snapshot that was in place. The snap was just over 3gig so it didn’t take too long to merge it back in.

After all of this finished, I went back into the Sun storage analytics. What an amazing change!

You can see shaded in yellow the combined traffic to storage just from the view manager’s delta and vswp files. The data point highlighted in the graph shows 3122 ops per sec to the swap file and 225 to the delta.

Notice how the overall NFS traffic drops pretty drastically after about 9:25.  The vswp file is empty now and the machine’s task manager shows very little page file usage.