For those who are looking to run vmware-server on gutsy there are some things you really need to do to the vmware-server config after you’ve installed it otherwise you will get some seriously crap performance.
The 20 cent summary is if you make the following changes to the vmware-server config file
prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = “TRUE”
prefvmx.minVmMemPct = “100″
and then add the following to each of your vm’s vmx files then performance will return to something quite acceptable.
sched.mem.pshare.enable = “FALSE”
mainMem.useNamedFile = “FALSE”
MemTrimRate = “0″
MemAllowAutoScaleDown = “FALSE”
Wonder about the level of performance improvement? Surely it can’t be that big a thing? Here is some sar output where the *only* changes made to the environment were the above changes.
15:25:01 CPU %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 18:25:01 all 11.73 0.00 60.93 0.32 0.00 27.02 18:35:01 all 12.18 0.00 55.72 0.73 0.00 31.37 18:45:01 all 10.93 0.00 58.32 1.03 0.00 29.72 18:55:01 all 12.23 0.00 48.99 0.72 0.00 38.06 19:05:01 all 11.09 0.00 64.69 0.46 0.00 23.76 19:15:01 all 12.24 0.00 55.00 0.74 0.00 32.03 19:25:01 all 11.83 0.00 51.72 0.73 0.00 35.71 19:35:01 all 12.22 0.00 58.18 0.52 0.00 29.07 19:45:01 all 12.81 0.00 50.40 0.62 0.00 36.16 19:55:01 all 10.31 0.00 62.12 3.46 0.00 24.11 20:05:01 all 1.00 0.00 11.85 6.60 0.00 80.55 20:15:01 all 0.03 0.00 0.48 0.40 0.00 99.09 20:25:01 all 0.01 0.00 0.48 0.35 0.00 99.16 20:35:01 all 0.01 0.00 0.41 0.24 0.00 99.34 20:45:01 all 0.02 0.00 0.46 0.20 0.00 99.32 20:55:01 all 0.01 0.00 0.38 0.20 0.00 99.40 21:05:01 all 0.01 0.00 0.39 0.26 0.00 99.34 21:15:01 all 0.02 0.00 0.39 0.37 0.00 99.21 21:25:01 all 0.01 0.00 0.51 0.30 0.00 99.18 21:35:01 all 0.01 0.00 0.37 0.23 0.00 99.38 21:45:01 all 0.02 0.00 0.43 0.22 0.00 99.33 21:55:01 all 0.00 0.00 0.28 0.22 0.00 99.49
Thanks Cath for finding all that!
