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22 Deployment Guide
GuestOS Performance Tuning Tips
The following tuning tips significantly improve performance over the
GuestOS 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 acrossVMs.
• 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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