On my desktop computer I have VirtualBox, and i can run a lot of concurrent VMs, up to near native speed.
On my server, that is twice as powerful than my desktop computer, I have debian+VMware server 1.0 (because I don't like the java bloat introduced with 2.0), and if I run a single VM, it runs up to near native speed.
The real bottleneck is disk access speed: if I start TWO (yes, just 2!) VMs at the same time (read: when the server will turn on), the server will be paralyzed for 40 minutes! 40 minutes for booting 2 Windows VMs! Completely useless!
I had better performance when I installed VirtualPC on a Celeron 400 Mhz!!!!
If I search for "vmware slow hdd access", I get tons of results, so, I assume this is an huge VMware problem, right?
So I was thinking one of this actions:
- Replace the server HDD with two SSDs in RAID 0
- Switch to Proxmox VE
Someone tried Proxmox? How better it is? Will it fix the bottleneck?
I don't have another spare server to experiment with, so, if I wipe my server to play with proxmox, I will lose at least 2 working days…
Best Answer
I have seen this behaviour when I assign too much memory to the VM's. When I start a VM that grabs memory from the host OS above some threshold, everything dies except for the hard drive LED. It takes an age just to shut down the VM.
Fine-tuning the memory footprint of the VM's has done wonders for me.