Virtual Server Performance Update

It’s been about a month and our new virtual servers are running great. In fact, we anticipate that we can probably double the amount of virtual servers on the host system. We are very encouraged. We are beginning to start performance tuning as some of the machines have slight lags while working in terminal services. However, it doesn’t seem to affect overall web server performance. 

Our monitoring logs show a substantial reduction in HTTP latency as compared to their physical counterparts. Our performance tuning plans include enabling Spanning Tree fast on the switch ports (helps increase recovery time if a port fails), upgrading the virtual NIC to the newer vmxnet virtual NIC, and by reviewing the HOST NIC’s and HDD to enable/disable recommended settings. Overall, we are pleased with the results so far and are beginning to plan additional virtualization deployments.