Microsoft Virtual Server (well, virtualization in general) is a godsend, especially now that it's free.  I've been on the VS bandwagon for a while now, but have been plagued with performance issues since the very beginning.  Initially I just chocked it up to being a result of the inherent overhead involved with virtualization and just suffered through it, but it's always been in the back of my mind that something might be wrong with the machine I host my VM's on.

A bit of background about that machine.  It's a moderately fast box (Intel P4 (socket 478) running at 2.0ghz with a large L2 cache and a pretty speedy FSB, 1 gig of RAM, and 2 large 7200rpm HDD's)...when I built it 6 years ago as my main workstation it was absolutely screaming fast for its day.  I had built plenty of machines before that one, but it was the first that I actually poured quite a bit of money into (i.e. I didn't build it out of spare parts).  It served me well for a few years before I retired it to server-dom to replace my ancient AMD K6II box running at a paltry 450mhz (which ran Windows 2003 Server quite well, even with only half a gig of RAM).  Point is, in its 6 years of existence it hasn't once blue screened/frozen/crashed/etc...it's been more reliable than any machine from the big 3 I've ever purchased, and has always been an all around workhorse with zero issues.  I've swapped a couple of drives in it, and that's all.

Earlier this weekend I was copying some stuff around my network and finally realized that something was indeed wrong with the HDD performance on that machine, namely the fact that it was taking almost 2 hours to copy a 10 gig VM image to that box.  I thought to myself "that can't be right" and pinged a buddy of mine asking if that was normal.  In a nutshell, no it's not...not even close.  10 gigs should take just a few minutes going from drive to drive within the same machine.  Turns out I was using 4 years old IDE drivers, and they were the generic Microsoft ones to boot.  An hour's worth of tracking down updated drivers later and that machine is absolutely hauling ass again, and the VM's that are hosted on it are on par performance-wise with a physical box.  No more 10 minute boot times...my staging VM boots in under 2 minutes now.  Copying images around takes about 1 minute per gigabyte.  In short, they are behaving as they should've been all along.

Make sure you're running the latest drivers on your machines!  Yes, it seems simple enough, but it's something I so carelessly overlooked.

Share this post: | | | | |