Slow VM's

ashrobbo · 18 Apr 2013 at 15:15

Hi All,

Trying to troubleshoot a slow citrix server for a customer which runs on an esxi 5.1 box.

Its an IBM 3300, Raid 5 (3 disks), two 6 core xeon cpu's (12 with HT, 24 entire machine) 32GB ram.

RUnning 3 servers on this box, Citrix has 16GB of RAM but constantly has high CPU usage.

It did have 2 vCPU with 2 cores (same as the other 2 vm's).

I have reduced this down to 1 vcpu with 4 cores and the CPU usage seems lower, however its still slow. The disk queue on the server is high at times (sometimes over 4/5) so im guessing its the raid disks not keeping up.

I did read that i may have over provisioned the CPU, so im wondering whether to reduce all to 1 processor and 2 cores? Shocked that 2 x 6 core processors are having issues so must be my config.

Ive turned off any guest power management using the vsphere client.

Any tips for troubleshooting this? The other server is a DC/File and another one runs web filtering and AV amongst a few smaller bespoke apps. If I can improve performance on all it would be good however citrix is the priority.

CPU

DISK

Thanks,

Ash

ashrobbo · 18 Apr 2013 at 15:44

The cpu is now much better after i reduced number of vcpu's and increased core to 4 on that 1 vcpu, processes are ok and it is the occasional spike when user logs on.

however im unsure whether to tell of itc disk or cpu related bottlenecks.

ashrobbo · 18 Apr 2013 at 17:26

3 raid 5 disks, sata 7.2k - not my choice.

Nothing stands out from those screenshots? no bottlenecks visible? I always thought it was disks I just wanted to figure out how bad it really is but vmware links are contradicting!

ashrobbo · 18 Apr 2013 at 21:40

Sorry lots of questions.

Didn't have much time today. To answer a few questions

- 8 users.
- it did have high CPU, CPU is now much lower on the host. The odd spike when people launch sage chrome etc.
- I suggested 15k sas disks but wanted to be sure disk was the bottleneck. I'm seeing disks queue length spike on guest too.
- thanks for links. Ill take a look.
- yes hardware raid with cache (but no cache battery!!!)

Would adding a 4th disk improve by much?

ashrobbo · 19 Apr 2013 at 19:14

I know the battery is the case with dell/HP however our reseller is adamant this isn't the case with the IBM raid card M5015.

Can't find any tech docs to confirm this though.

Anybody know?

ashrobbo · 20 Apr 2013 at 16:01

Apologies its an M5110, but again adament it supports write back without a battery, im wondering whether I need to 'force' it to do this though. Trying to get LSI storage manager to see the card but because its an esxi 5.1 host it wont see it

ashrobbo · 21 Apr 2013 at 12:13

Ok chaps

Just incase anybody has a similar issue. As above you can force it on using Lsi MSM. I loaded this into a remote machine. Did a discover and the esxi server showed up but with ip of 0.0.0.0 when trying to connect it had an unable to connect to CIMOM error.

After reading some incredibly in descriptive articles all I needed to do is add the esxi FQDN and ip to the hosts file of the remote machine I was working on. Launching MSM (run as administrator) it found it and connected (had to connect twice to get it to show anything).

Went into virtual drive settings and write through was enabled but I also have an entry for BBU with a green tick, so maybe it does have a battery after all!!

Changed to write back and everything appears better. However no load on the box until tomorrow so we will see.

Thanks for the assistance

Ash