RE: RHEL4 running on VMWare ESX 2.5.2

["Bojan Zdrnja" <b zdrnja auckland ac nz>]

Finnur, 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: nahant-list-bounces redhat com 
> [mailto:nahant-list-bounces redhat com] On Behalf Of Finnur 
> Örn Guðmundsson - TM Software Skyggnir
> Sent: Wednesday, 26 October 2005 11:03 p.m.
> To: nahant-list redhat com
> Subject: RHEL4 running on VMWare ESX 2.5.2
> 
> Hi,
> 
> We recently started running 2x IBM X445 (dual xeon/16gb ram) 
> machines on VMWare. I wanted to run a few virtual linux 
> machines from there due to testing and other stuff ....
> 
> I installed RHEL4 U1 on around 4 machines. The performance is 
> awwwwfuuull! ;).....I did install the VMWare tools but the 
> performance didnt really get any better ...IO is just saaaad 
> on those boxes :O....I've been running tomcat for a 
> webapplication there and the load is around 1.5-2 without any 
> cpu and the machine acts extremly sluggish doing simple 
> operation ...kinda like it does not have DMA enabled to the 
> harddrives :O (Just to note ...Windows runs fine on those bricks).
> 
> Has anyone any experience of running RHEL4 (or any 2.6 kernel 
> based distro) on VMWare ESX? I cant seem to find anything 
> about this problem on Google ....

First of all, I think that RHEL4 is not supported on VMWare ESX server (this
has maybe changed - I didn't check VMWare for couple of months). Be sure to
read the documentation about RTC problems under VMWare and how to fix them.

That said, in order to increase your performance you will want to change the
network card driver from vlance to vmxnet and (definitely) the SCSI
controller from vmxbuslogic to the vmxlsilogic. This should give you much
better performance. If that is still not good enough, you should see what
kind of application your running etc, in order to see if it's a good
candidate for VM at all.

Cheers,

Bojan