Dell PowerEdge T110 II

Django x2 · 29 Apr 2013 at 21:54

Got one of these with 4Gb :rolleyes:

and I've spun up ESXi 5.1 on it as it's using a Dell HW Raid card. It has two VMs running, both 2012 Standard, one Core, one Full GUI. Core is a small DC and GUI is Exchange 2013.

The Exchange box has two test users and 2GB Ram and the DC has 512mb RAM. The Exchange box is woefully painful to connect to. It's so slow to navigate around. Now, I know Exchange harvests pretty much all of the memory but I've got production Exchange 2010 boxes that don't behave anywhere near as slowly.

Basically, I'm trying to decipher what the bottleneck is. Personally, I don't think its memory or CPU but could be the disks (although again, I've seen similar production servers with no issue). That leads me to just ESXi (Usually used Hyper V).

Are there any good performance counters I can look at to see what's going on underneath?

ashrobbo · 29 Apr 2013 at 21:58

what version of exchange?

2gb of ram isnt enough, surely you could throw some more at both DC and exchange and see if that improves?

Look at the disk queue within the resource monitor and let us know the rsults.

Esxi has the performance tab built in which should give you a good indicator. You could also use esxtop over ssh (google it)

Django x2 · 1 May 2013 at 08:04

No, I know it's not enough (the box only has 4GB at the mo, in total), but I've run Exchange VMs before in test with similar memory and they've not been this slow. Its Exchange 2013

RSR · 1 May 2013 at 10:08

I run Exchange 2013 at home in VMware and I have found it very sluggish with a low amount of RAM and slow disks.

I have mine setup like the follow:

VM-CAS01
1vCPU
2GB RAM
50GB VMDK - OS

VM-MAIL01
2vCPU
3GB RAM
50GB VMDK - OS
75GB VMDK - Logs
100GB VMDK - Data

Using the above, its been pretty nippy for testing / learning.

I also have these running from a SSD, which helps massively. As using normal SATA disks, I was seeing a large amount of I/O which was also causing Exchange to become sluggish.