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Improving Virtual Server Performance

Monday, 27 February 2006 by Michel Roth

Rodney Buike has posted his "Top 5" tips to improving Virtual Server performance. Many of these tips also apply to other virtualization products:

"Virtual Server 2005 is a great program for learning, testing and consolidating. There are a number of ways to improve performance and here are my top 5 performance improvements."

1.) Add more memory - Each virtual machine will require the same memory as a physical machine would. The more memory you have the more virtual machines you can run. Pretty simple! (I never said these improvements would be free!)

2.) Run Virtual Server 2005 R2 x64 - The 64bit version of Virtual Server 2005 allows you to blow past the 4GB memory limits (see #1) and offers other performance improvements. I made the switch to x64 a while back and people are shocked at the number of virtual machines I can run and the responsiveness of them. They are also shocked by the fact that I have a dedicated Virtual Server at home :)

3.) Place the VHDs on a seperate HDD - For best performance the VHD files should be on a seperate HDD from the OS and other files. A seperate partition won't help, a dedicated HDD or RAID array will. Also the faster the HDD the better. Look into the Western Digital 10K SATA HDD or if you can afford it, 15K SCSI HDDs.

4.) Maitain the HDDs - The more fragmented the drive holding the VHDs the longer it will take to start, stop, pause and resume virtual machines. Defrag the OS drive, compact the VHDs and defrag the host systems drive where the VHDs are located on a regular basis. Virtual Server R2 includes Virtual Disk Precompactor for you to use before you compact a dynamically expanding VHD in order to create a smaller compacted VHD.

5.) Install VMAdditions - This is one of the most often overlooked issues with new virtual machines. The VMAdditions are special drivers used to improve performance on the virtual machines. Because Virtual Server virtualizes standard hardware, the OS will install without the need for any drivers. Installing the VMAdditions will add fucntionality and increase performance of virtual machines.

6.) Use SCSI VHDs - I know I said top 5, but this is important. All virtual machines should use SCSI VHDs. The SCSI driver will give the better performance over IDE VHDs no matter what type of HDDs the host system is using. Best of all the SCSI driver is built into all versions of Windows from NT4 and up!.

Read it all here.