Our software department has a server running VMWare Server 2. We typically have 8-10 VMs running as test environments (Win XP and Server 08) for various versions of our software, and one VM that is used as a build server (Win XP).
The host is running Server 2003 R2. It has 32GB RAM, 8 core Xeon 3.16GHz CPU, one disk for host OS and two raid disks for VMs.
The majority of the time, this setup behaves very well and there are no complaints. Other times, the VMs can be very laggy. This is sometimes, but not always, correlated to heavy load on the build server.
I'm a software developer, not an IT pro, but it seems to me that this machine should be beefy enough to handle this many VMs. Is this occasional performance hit likely just because we're hitting the limits of the hardware, or should I be looking for another culprit?
From what I've read, I'm guessing if there's a bottleneck, it's probably disk I/O with all these VMs running off two disks (especially the build server). Would spreading the VMs over more disks, and/or switching to SSDs give us a significant performance boost?
Other things I've read may increase performance:
single virtual processor per VM
removing/disabling unused virtual hardware
preallocated disk space
not using snapshots
setting a reserved memory limit on the host and disabling VM memory swapping
Can anyone confirm or deny if any of these improve performance? What other good tweaks have I missed?
