Installation guide

C H A P T E R 1 2 VMware ESX Server Resource Management
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If the problem is VMkernel swapping, then check and make sure VMware Tools is
installed. Place the swap file in a different physical drive than the virtual disks. You may
also consider adding more physical memory to the server, or possibly migrating some
virtual machines onto another ESX Server.
Improving Slow Performance on Virtual Machines
If slow performance is isolated on just a few virtual machines, then you should first
check their resource utilization before examining the service console.
Note:
Determine if the guest operating system is doing a lot of paging (swapping).
• In a Linux guest operating system, run the vmstat command. For more
information, see the vmstat(8) man page.
• In a Windows guest operating system, open the Control Panel. Double-click
Administrative Tools, then double-click Performance. Check the value for
pages/second.
If a virtual machine is paging a lot, then increase the minimum memory so that
excessive paging is eliminated. If you’re close to the maximum memory size, then also
increase that resource setting.
Optimizing Performance on the Service Console
If the problem is with CPU resources, then increase the CPU minimum of the service
console and see if that solves the problem.
You can also improve performance by not connecting unnecessarily through the
remote console. For example, unless you are performing an action in a virtual
machine, close the remote console. Having a remote console window open, without
any activity, still uses CPU resources in the service console.
To optimize performance, you can use other third-party software, such as Virtual
Network Computing (VNC) viewer or Microsoft Terminal Services to connect to your
virtual machine, without consuming CPU resources in the service console.