Comments on: VMware Server Disk IO Performance

By: VMware ESXi vs XenServer | Routing Life

VMware ESXi vs XenServer | Routing Life — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:17:47 +0000

[...] all started with VMware Server installed on Ubuntu 8.04, but that turned out to be not such a performant solution. Then came the day VMware made ESXi free to use. After some hardware compatibility troubles we [...]

By: marco

marco — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:25:11 +0000

I do have exactly the same HW, and exactly the same issues with performance. However I´m not shure if your post relates to VMWare Serve 1 or 2 ?

I do have 4 guests running, consuming overall ~ 6G out of the 8G available.

If I do assign a 12G Ramdisk to an 8G system, what will be the consequence in case it gets filled to more than the available amount of memory ? Wouldn´t the system start to swap ?

In addition, how about power loss scenarios, what happens if the machine is cut off suddenly ? I assume this shouldn´t have any impact (hence any memory would be lost as well in that case), but… ?

Maybe stupid questions, however I do have question marks above my head (might also be due to the late night hours

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:33:10 +0000

Thankyou !

Ubuntu 9.04 -VM2.01 – P4 3.06 – 2Gig RAM – running at home with 2k server and four linux guests is now usable. Prior to this any copying to or from 2k server guest was depressingly slow.

By: Willes

Willes — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:36:58 +0000

This solved my problem.

Xeon RAID 5 HP proliant 8 cores

Went from 2 mb/sec to 40 mb/sec trough put.

Thanks!

By: John Drescher

John Drescher — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:14:10 +0000

I am having this problem as well on a Quad core 9550 with 6GB of memory. Although I have not benchmarked, Disk performance under vmware server is pathetic. Also it seems (via iotop) to be very write happy. I mean writing in very small chunks all the time. I will try your solution. 12GB for tempfs, I don’t have that much swap so I guess I will have to trim that and possibly mount it to a different folder than /tmp.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:04:13 +0000

Excellent: exactly my problem and the solution to it. THANKS!
@Dittohead

Reboot your rystem after mounting /tmp with tmpfs.
Your gui stores several runtime-files in /tmp and you hide all these files after mounting /tmp. So restart your X or better restart your server once.

By: Pieter

Pieter — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:41:37 +0000

Ah, nice!
Handy.

By: Dittohead

Dittohead — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 14:43:47 +0000

I tried your solution but once I mount the /tmp I am not able to start vmware. I get the error message: “/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgio-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_thread_gettime”. Also, I can’t use any shortcuts or start programs from Applications menu. Weird…
Unmounting sorts out the issue.

By: Lode

Lode — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:44:14 +0000

I made a mistake there, “sudo mount /etc” should ofcourse be “sudo mount /tmp”. Also changed it in my post. Thx for letting me know!

By: Matteo

Matteo — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:57:58 +0000

Hi only a question if possibile, with the command

sudo mount /etc

you mount the tmpfs /tmp parsing the /etc/fstab by default?

We should do simple

sudo mount /tmp

afte put the line

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs rw,size=12G 0 0

in our /etc/fstab