Dell 2.12 manual Guest OS Performance Tuning Tips

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Guest OS Performance Tuning Tips

The following tuning tips significantly improve performance over the Guest OS and VMTools default installations and are highly recommended for Dell qualified configurations.

NOTE: The actual results of the tuning tips provided here depend on the configuration and will vary accordingly.

Maximize ESX Server system tuning across VMs prior to individual VM Guest OS tuning. See VMware ESX Server 2.1 product documentation at www.vmware.com/support/esx21/doc for scheduling CPU, memory, and disk bandwidth across VMs.

Ensure VMware Tools are installed to improve video and mouse performance and other benefits.

Disable all CPU-intensive screen savers.

Ensure that each VM's guest OS type is correct in its configuration file.

To ensure best device performance ensure that you are using supported devices. See www.dell.com/vmware for details.

For best performance, VMs should use separate resources from the Service Console, specifically Ethernet NIC cards.

Ideally, each VM should be running only one application.

For CPU-bound workloads, enable hyper-threading on the ESX Server system.

For shared resources, pair VMs that will not compete for the same resource.

Avoid using the two legacy Serial (COM) ports or Parallel (LPT) port devices by VMs.

Disconnect CD-ROM device from all the VMs.

For all VMs that do not require PXE boot, it is highly recommended to replace vlance with vmxnet device as the virtual NIC. It is included and documented in VMware Tools. This will drastically improve performance when Gigabit Ethernet is used and the VMs have high bandwidth requirements.

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Deployment Guide

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Contents Deployment Guide Page Deployment Guide August Contents Figures Introduction W . d e l l . c o m s u p p o r t . d e l l . c o m Understanding Dell Configurations RAIDGB RAM Deployment Guide VirtualCenter Configuration with SAN for VMotion Understanding ESX Server Components Understanding VirtualCenter ComponentsDeployment Guide Before Installation Recommended Local Disk Partitioning Service Console Configuration SAN Environment Setup with ESX Server Software After InstallationLoad balancing Setting Up Manual Load Balancing Dell OpenManage in a VMware ESX Server EnvironmentOpenManage Software Overview Example of a Management Station and Managed Systems Using the Dell Remote Access Card III Drac III on PE Guest OS Installation Guest Operating SystemsGuest OS Performance Tuning Tips Identify the limited resource by application type Workload = TerminalServices Additional Resources Product Documentation ResourcesTechnical Support Resources Newsgroups Index D e ESX Server software installation D e