Hi
We have ran into an performance issue on a development VM running Windows Server 2003 r2 32bit (Vm Ver7, ESXi 4.1.0), it seems the disk are the issue so we have been doing some performance testing on a number of servers and hosts we have found that even on the same host a Window Server 2003 r2 VM that was cloned from hardware has markedly slower disk performance compared to a cleanly installed VM.
Our testing has been done with clean disks being added to the VMs and formatted via disk part and aligned, in fact a none aligned disk on the clean server runs some 5 times faster during a test written by one of our developers compared to the cloned VM.
Is there anything we can do to the cloned VM? It is currently thick provisioned and the vmware tools installed are the latest and the disk tested are aligned ok. Both servers are running on the same host which is using 4 15k disks in a RAID 10 array
Test results
ReadWriteTest.exe on ETWP TO2 (cloned VM, 2 CPU)
2 minutes 30.82 seconds
2 Minutes 32.43 Seconds
2 Minutes 31.82 Seconds
ReadWriteTest.exe on Test Server (cloned VM, 1 CPU)
36.52 Seconds
36.08 Seconds
37.48 Seconds
The test is a simple exe that creates 10 folder, in each folder it creates another 10 folders and fills each folder with 100 text files with a number in them, the reason this test was created was to simultate 1000s of small files being written to disk. As a guide, I have ran the test on my desktop and it scores 2 minutes 49 seconds.