ESXi 6r2 VM Performance Help

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Cupcake

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Hi everyone, I'm a new guy here and found these forums after a Google search on my issue.

As you can tell from the title it's a VM performance issue on my ESXi server.

Background

Fortunate to have access to a data center via my employer as I work for an ISP. We are allowed our own 1u servers in there.

I have had a Dell Poweredge 1950 in there for around 12 months now running ESXi

Upgraded to ESXi 6.0 r2 a couple of months ago.

Using server for running VMs which will have basic tasks such as internet surfing, email setup (not exchange server, just standard Outlook, Thunderbird config), no media streaming or transcoding at all.

Hardware

Dual Xeon L5320 @1.86GHz (2 Sockets, 4 Cores per socket)
32gb DDR2 ECC Ram
2 x HDD (1x 70GB SAS 15k & 1 x 300GB SATA 7200)

Software/VMs

ESXi 6.0 r2
1 x pfSense VM
1 x untangle VM
1 x Windows 10 VM (accessed using RDP)
1 x Linux Mint VM (accessed using VNC)
1 x Mac OS X VM (accessed using VNC)

At any one time I will have one of the pfSense or Untangle fired up as the firewall/router, and 1 or of the OS VM's.

Ever since I installed the server and loaded up VMs I've been having performance issues. The issues are general unresponsivness from the VM's when doing the mosst basic tasks such as web browsing, and getting input lag, making the whole experience frustrating.

I have peared back the applied resources to the VMs to try and eliminate any over utilisation on them.

So for example, my Windows 10 VM now has 1 vCPU 4GB ram and 80bg allocated for the disk.

I've been through the guides on the VMWare site re using esxtop to find any bottlenecks in resources but absolutely everything from that checked out fine.

I'm really at a loss as to what could be causing such slow VM's.

Network throughput isn't an issue either having run speedtests from the VM's and checked the VLANs on the server itself with our network guys.

Any help would be massively appreciated, and if there's anything that I may have left out above to help, please let me know.
 

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They're not supported but they generally run fine. That being said, I suspect strongly that you've got a storage performance problem more than anything else, but even with a bad BBWC the PERC cards tend to be decently quick, unless you've got totally crap drives in there. What drives do you have?

Those are older low-power CPUs too, but it should be responsive...
 
Dytralis said:
Have you updated the virtual hardware of the VM's and VMware Tools yet? Just to let you know, the 1950's aren't supported by anything above 5.1u3

http://www.vmware.com/resources/com...interval=500&sortColumn=Partner&sortOrder=Asc
Click to expand...

thanks for your reply. I've got all the vHardware up to date and vmTools are up to date as well.

I wouldn't be able to run 5.1 on it as it would surely flag as out of date and vulnerable. The network ran scans across the co-lo estate before christmas when I was running 6.0, and that flagged vulnerabilities resulting in me needing to update the Hypervisor.
 
lopoetve said:
They're not supported but they generally run fine. That being said, I suspect strongly that you've got a storage performance problem more than anything else, but even with a bad BBWC the PERC cards tend to be decently quick, unless you've got totally crap drives in there. What drives do you have?

Those are older low-power CPUs too, but it should be responsive...
Click to expand...

The sas drive is a seagate 15k raptor.

The sata drive is a 300gb 10k WD
 
I'm just in the middle of testing performance from a VM created outside the vLAN to see if performance improves.

Wondering if the pfSense and Untangle firewalls/routers either aren't configured correctly or are slowing the performance as well.
 
are you seeing any dropped packets either in esxtop or in your firewalls?
 
Dytralis said:
are you seeing any dropped packets either in esxtop or in your firewalls?
Click to expand...

None, and that's what's confusing me even more.

I've got a Linux VM setup now outside of the virtual LAN network, and that seems to be running a lot smother than the machines inside the LAN, so I'm now more and more leaning towards the firewall/router as causing the issue.

As to why or how to resolve is another matter.
 
Is the storage local to the box?

We had an issue with 6.0 u2 and our Extreme IO that the only workaround from VMware was to disable smartd
 
Did you have performance issues prior to upgrading to 6.0 U2?

Are you using official Dell VMware media?

BTW, the last version that is supported on that model is 5.1 U3.
 
bigdogchris said:
Did you have performance issues prior to upgrading to 6.0 U2?

Are you using official Dell VMware media?

BTW, the last version that is supported on that model is 5.1 U3.
Click to expand...

This is the vanilla version from vmware direct.
 
Cupcake said:
yeah storage is on the box itself.

What's smartd?
Click to expand...

It's the agent that runs SMART queries against drives. Odd that it'd do something against a remote drive, but bugs do happen. SMART has a known issue with SATA devices - I assume you have a PERC card in there since noe of the drives at least is SAS?
 
lopoetve said:
It's the agent that runs SMART queries against drives. Odd that it'd do something against a remote drive, but bugs do happen. SMART has a known issue with SATA devices - I assume you have a PERC card in there since noe of the drives at least is SAS?
Click to expand...

Yeah I have a PERC card in there, but it's not setup for remote connections. I'd have to go down to the data centre when I'm in work to access it.

One of the drives is a SAS drive I've got in there. The 70GB raptor is a SAS drive.

How can I check on the stats of SMARTd? or disable it?

I've had a root around Google, but struggled to find something definitive.
 
just done the above for smartd now my box is back online.

Going to see how performance is now on the VM's
 
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