Benchmark Test Configuration
2 x VMware vSphere 4 hosts
2 x Dell PE2950 Hardware
– Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5410 @ 2.33GHz
– 16GB RAM
– Qlogic QLE8042 10GbE Mercury Converged Network Adapter(CNA) – connected to PCIe 8x slot

Updated: PERC 6/i version. 6.2.0-0013 & BOIS version. 2.6.1

VMware vSphere vCenter
– running as virtual machine
– 4vCPU
– 6GB RAM
– Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard edition

2 x Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard edition virtual machines
– 4vCPU
– 4GB RAM

Software:
Netperf

MTU 9000 setup
VMware vSphere host
esxcfg-vswitch -m 9000 vSwitch2

Windows Server 2003 standard edition virtual machine
Device Manager -> Network Adapters -> VMXNET3 Ethernet Adapter -> Properties -> Advanced -> Jumbo Packet -> Jumbo 9000 and Speed / Duplex -> 10Gbps Full Duplex

Cisco Nexus 5000K – Enable MTU 9000 and Jumbo Frame

VMware vSphere hosts
name: esx05
name: esx06

Windows Server 2003 standard edition virtual machine
name: test1 (running on esx06)
name: test2 (running on esx05)

Virtual Switch
Port Group name – test262 (Connected with single vNICs detected as Intel 82598EB 10 Gigabit AF Dual Port Network) with VLAN ID 1.

Note: vSphere auto detect as ISP8432 4Gb FCoE PCI Express HBA & Intel 82598EB 10 Gigabit

And the result:

click to enlarge.

Updated: 10 July 2009
CNA connected back to back on 2 VMware vSphere servers.

Probably you may refer to VMware documentation as link below:
- 10GugE Performance
- ESX Networking Planning

Another tricky part is, I’m managed to get total of 6G out of 10G if I running 10 VMs instances with 8192 Message Size and 163840 Socket Size as suggested in documentation as above. Again, single netperf session will get about 2.7G for Linux and 1.5G for Windows either Nexus 5K nor back to back connection. And you may get better result with 1 CPU compare to 4 CPUs or 8 CPUs which I believed a limitation on netperf itself.

Updated: 27 July 2009

Windows 2008 Standard Edition with 1vCPU, E1000 vNIC and 5G single file transfer.

Windows 2008 Standard Edition with 1vCPU, E1000 vNIC and netperf.

Windows 2008 Standard Edition with 1vCPU, VMXNET3 vNIC, Internet Download Manager HTTP multiple sessions download.

Windows 2008 Data Center Edition with 1vCPU, VMXNET3 vNIC, 5G single file transfer.

Windows 2008 Data Center Edition with 8vCPU, VMXNET3 vNIC, 5G single file transfer with default TCP setup.

Windows 2008 Data Center Edition with 8vCPU, VMXNET3 vNIC, 5G single file transfer with TCP tuning enabled.

Summary:
The result are not consistent and I believed they may have some limitation on VMware or Microsoft Windows Operating System or Qlogic CNA card driver.

Updated:
Thanks to Maurizio & Craig comments. I’m fully agreed with you guys that the Cisco Nexus 5000 is not the bottleneck but other factors.

You can read more about the article from here and watch the nice video too.

Have fun.

Preliminary Note

• Operating System: Windows 2003
• Hostname: Win07
• Initial drive c: hard disk space: 12 GB
• Allocate additional hard disk space: 8GB
• Total size(resize) = 20GB
• VMware ESX version 3.5 update 3
• GPart LiveCD 0.3.9-4

Note: We’re NOT warranty and response for any disk corruption. Please make sure you have BACKUP before proceed.

Here you go step by step:

1. Power off Windows 2003 virtual machine.
2. Resize existing hard disk size from 12Gb to 20Gb.



3. Power on Windows 2003 virtual machine and make sure you can see additional disk allocated.



4. Once again, restart Windows 2003 virtual machine and boot with GPart LiveCD(default settings).



5. Select ‘Don’t touch keymap’ and press ‘ENTER’.
6. Press ’33′ and ‘ENTER’.
7. Please ‘ENTER’ to continue.
8. Right click on GParted menu -> click ‘Resize/Move’.
9. Use your mouse and scroll/resize /dev/sda1 to maximum size.



10. Click ‘Resize/Move’.
11. Click ‘Apply’ twice.
12. Click ‘Close’.



13. Restart Windows 2003 virtual machine again and I would suggest you run Windows checkdisk(chkdsk) during boot up.



14. Go to Windows Disk Management tools.



15. Gongratulation if you can see 20Gb drive C: available.

Any feedback or comment are welcome and I hope this guide is helpful.

The only difficulty I have now is Daemon Tools, which use for ISO purpose. Beside that, I am using it as my day to day operational purpose including Microsoft Office, firefox, IE 8, Live messenger and etc. Respond wise had been significant improve as compare to Vista previously.

I am not installed my Workstation to Windows 7 64 bits Ultimate version and use in full mode for my office work. I would like to say I am happy on it. If you want to have a try on this, you will always able to install the windows 7 on both VMware Workstation and VMware Server. Have fun.

Below is step by step guide with screen captured from the VM (my test machine is running on Windows 2003 Enterprise):

Tip: It is best to do a snapshot before you start this task, incase anything goes wrong.

1) This is my test VM machine. It is having one disk at beginning.

2) I am going to add the second disk with 2GB space.

3) Click on Action, then choose "Rescan Disks".

4) Windows detected a new disk.

5) You need to initialize the disk before you can use it.

6) Format it and map it as E:"

Ok, our job done. Now you have a new volume on the Windows box.

Basically setting up a brand new Windows 2003 machine is pretty simple but setup a new Virtual Machine took me 2 days. The most important is my VM template is go missing. The quick solution is search for VM template and register (add to inventory) again.

SSH into my ESX server using putty and search for VM template file with extension “.vmtx”.

[root@malaysiavmesx01 vmfs]# find /vmfs -name *.vmtx
/vmfs/volumes/465eeddb-89b75750-a52d-011aa0289d15/W2K3STD/W2K3STD.vmtx
/vmfs/volumes/465eeda7-2a63d436-724b-011aa0289d15/RHEL5/RHEL5.vmtx

How to register a VM template using CLI:
[root@malaysiavmesx01 vmfs]# /usr/bin/vmware-cmd -s register

In my case, I will register my VM template as example below:
[root@malaysiavmesx01 vmfs]# /usr/bin/vmware-cmd -s register /vmfs/volumes/465eeddb-89b75750-a52d-011aa0289d15/W2K3STD/W2K3STD.vmtx
[root@malaysiavmesx01 vmfs]# /usr/bin/vmware-cmd -s register /vmfs/volumes/465eeda7-2a63d436-724b-011aa0289d15/RHEL5/RHEL5.vmtx

Probably you can check previous article “How to re-register a VM once it had been removed from ESX” posted by Craig for register a VM template using Virtual Center and browse through the data store.

The lesson tell me I MUST backup SQL database and VM template keep in the database.

I did a quick test and I would like to share my personal review about Citrix XenServer 5.0:

Personally I think network speed is fast compare to VMware ESX. I have a physical 1Gbps NIC network speed and I can get 2Gbps network speed after install XenTools on Windows 2008 server but require 2 times reboot(SuSE Linux require 1 reboot). Anyway VM guest shutdown and reboot process is faster than VMware ESX.

I was try to install SuSE Linux 10 using 4 ISO CD (both NFS or CIFS), the Citrix XenServer always give me an error “The VM rejected the attempt to detach the device xxxxx refusing to close” when switch ISO CD1 to ISO CD2. You have to extract 4 ISO CD into one single location to make it work or copy ISO to local storage(provider you have enough local disk space).

The enterprise product should not have similar issue and this is not make sense at all.

Anyway, you can try alternative way using “Install URL” instead of using ISO Image once you have extract ISO CD into single folder on your web server.

Install URL: http://xx.xx.xx.xx/inst/10/32/SP2/ALL
Advanced Boot OS Parameters:
console=ttyS0 xencons=ttyS hostip=xx.xx.xx.xx/24 gateway=xx.xx.xx.xx dnsserver=xx.xx.xx.xx

Please make sure your have correct IP, gateway and DNS setup properly else you will getting error during installation.

Add and remove any disk/storage on Window 2008 or SuSE Linux 10 no downtime or reboot required. The VM guest OS will detect automatically.

Convert to template and VM clone features which are another features behind VMware ESX.

Once you have converted to template, you won’t have another way to reverse back as VM guest machine. It’s one way operation which you will received a warning before convert to template as show below.

Right click VM guest, and click Copy VM will do VM cloning but require downtime. The Copy VM feature is disable during VM guest is power on.

Overall, I would said VMware ESX still my first choice.

Participating Vendors

The following companies who supply server virtualization software to the marketplace have formally committed to participate in the Server Virtualization Validation Program. Microsoft is working with them to validate their solutions as platforms for Windows Server 2008. Please contact them directly for any additional information.

Cisco Systems, Inc.

Citrix Systems, Inc.

Novell, Inc.

Sun Microsystems

Unisys Corp.

Virtual Iron Software

VMware Inc.

Microsoft said they will support the windows machine which run on virtual server, but they refuse to support the VM which run on VMware. As consumer point of view, that will really as a show stopper to a lot of the potential customer to host thier production environment with more windows server in the future.

Compare Microsoft with Novell SUSE Linux, Novell really do a great job providing full support to the customer who have subscript for support every year, and they will support any virtualization platform that you will host your SUSE Linux.

As Linux as strong growth from time to time, this announcement from Microsoft will not drive up the market percentage they have on the virtualization as well as servers products. It will just create another concern to all the users when they do want to implement a new project, and Microsoft will not be the 1st choice mostly.