What performance loss should I expect going from a physical 2012 server to VMware

[Grimham]

What performance loss should I expect going from a physical 2012 server to having it hosted on VMware vSphere?
I'm really not a fan of the limited functionality of Hyper-V - before anyone suggests it.

I've actually been using VirtualBox for the last few years because it was the best combination of features and speed for my needs. But now I figured it might be time to give VMware another shot.

I'll have MS Server 2012 R2 Standard and multiple Win7 Vms. The 2012 VM will always be running and at most I will have 2-3 Win7 VMs open at one time with very light use on two out of the three of them. This is a home test lab, and I'll only be really stressing one Win7 VM at a time.

Specs..

Dell PowerEdge T110 II
Xeon E3-1230 3.20GHz 4C/8T
16GB ram (soon to be 32)
Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SSD boot drive
(2X) 3TB drives in RAID 1 - storage

Thanks!

 

[dclive]

What performance loss should I expect going from a physical 2012 server to having it hosted on VMware vSphere?
I'm really not a fan of the limited functionality of Hyper-V - before anyone suggests it.

I've actually been using VirtualBox for the last few years because it was the best combination of features and speed for my needs. But now I figured it might be time to give VMware another shot.

I'll have MS Server 2012 R2 Standard and multiple Win7 Vms. The 2012 VM will always be running and at most I will have 2-3 Win7 VMs open at one time with very light use on two out of the three of them. This is a home test lab, and I'll only be really stressing one Win7 VM at a time.

Specs..

Dell PowerEdge T110 II
Xeon E3-1230 3.20GHz 4C/8T
16GB ram (soon to be 32)
Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SSD boot drive
(2X) 3TB drives in RAID 1 - storage

Thanks!

With that sort of a setup and those needs, if you really only have one VM going, you're not likely to have much of an impact, depending on how you set it up.

Are you disk IO limited now? If so, virtualizing won't help. But most people likely couldn't stress an SSD (and that's a decent one) with only 2 or 3 VMs going at once, even if they're all cranking away, so unless you're really doing heavy duty disk IO stuff, you aren't likely to notice too much of an impact. That SSD really helps matters; if you didn't have that in there, I'd say having a simple mirror with 7200 RPM basic disks and 2-3 VMs going at once could lead to significant slowdown - again, depending on what you do.

Are you CPU limited now? Obviously, you'll be sharing CPU. But bear in mind that VMware is pretty efficient at sharing, and unless you really need all four cores of that Xeon concurrently, you likely won't notice too much of a difference.

Get more RAM. 32GB is likely the max for that model, and it's a good place to be. 16GB is sometimes limiting for me; I run Intel NUC-type machines with dual core i3/i5 + 16GB + either 1TB SSD (NFS) or 256GB SSD (local). But ... that...too..all depends on what you want to do and how many concurrent VMs you want to run - and how quickly you want them to run.

 

[cdabc123]

going from one os with 2012 server to one vm with 2012 server you lose almost no preformance. however even with light use i would add 2 more hdds for each of the lower preformnace vms to boot from haveing vms share a single disk yields terrible preformance

 

[Grimham]

Are you disk IO limited now? If so, virtualizing won't help. But most people likely couldn't stress an SSD (and that's a decent one) with only 2 or 3 VMs going at once, even if they're all cranking away, so unless you're really doing heavy duty disk IO stuff, you aren't likely to notice too much of an impact. That SSD really helps matters; if you didn't have that in there, I'd say having a simple mirror with 7200 RPM basic disks and 2-3 VMs going at once could lead to significant slowdown - again, depending on what you do.

going from one os with 2012 server to one vm with 2012 server you lose almost no preformance. however even with light use i would add 2 more hdds for each of the lower preformnace vms to boot from haveing vms share a single disk yields terrible preformance

Yeah, I've been seriously considering another SSD just for the guests. And like I said, since I won't really be stressing but one guest at a time, I think it will handle it well.

My whole reason for asking this is that I tried to use Vmware a few years ago, but it was noticeably slower than VirtualBox with Win7 guests. And Hyper-v is not a viable option.

 

[cdabc123]

Yeah, I've been seriously considering another SSD just for the guests. And like I said, since I won't really be stressing but one guest at a time, I think it will handle it well.

My whole reason for asking this is that I tried to use Vmware a few years ago, but it was noticeably slower than VirtualBox with Win7 guests. And Hyper-v is not a viable option.

vmware qwill be much faster if configured right curently i run 3 vms at the same time 2 gaming/workstation ones and one file server the preformance honestly compares to 2 $1000-2000 rigs and a nice nas. i wouldnt just get one ssd though get two used ssds or two cheap hdds instead shareing a disk between the vms is the quickest way to lose preformance. another hypervisor to check out is proxmox its completly free and will do everything vmware will do however it can be abit mroe complecated when you are doing passthrough and will lose about 2-5% more preformance

 

[michalrz]

There is almost no performance penalty.
I've tried KVM/QEMU, VMware, old single core Athlons, older Quads, newer quad xeons... seriously, it's surprisingly forgiving.
I don't even have issues with IO slowing down on one VM when another is doing intensive disk thrashing. You'll finally get to see just how much your server actually wastes not doing anything
Just get the IO, VGA and Network guest drivers ready. Preferably download them to the physical machine before going virtual in case you experience USB/network troubles.

 

[Olga-SAN]

it depends what his windows server 2012 vm does

low latency i/o cripples for sure !!

going from one os with 2012 server to one vm with 2012 server you lose almost no preformance. however even with light use i would add 2 more hdds for each of the lower preformnace vms to boot from haveing vms share a single disk yields terrible preformance