Admin links slow / timing out using VMware

[Pedro]

Hi

Can anybody help? We have created a new planning environment using VMware and we are experiencing very slow performance with our admin links. For example an admin link which ran in PRD in about 3 mins now times out after 30 mins, while others are running but are taking three or four times longer to complete.

I was expecting a performance degradation with using VM but not to this extent. It's strange that it is only the admin links which are a problem, the montioring console shows the admin link running nicely through each of the items but then it just hangs on the last few items and it's these last few items which it is struggling with.


The job servers are set to -1 on Max concurrent jobs. We have 4 processors on each job server and I have tried changing this setting to 3, but no joy.

Has anyone else experienced such poor performance using VM, I am trying to determine if this normal or whether we have a problem with the config.

Thanks in advance

[jeffowentn]

Pedro,

How may servers do you have and what role does each play?  Are they all VM's or are some still physical?

Also, do you have DEP set to Windows and essential programs only?

Have you looked at your Virtual Memory settings (Control Panel > System > Advanced > Performance Options > Advanced)?

Lastly, and I'm not familiar with the different ones, but it could also be dependent on the chipset in the virtual server farm (or the weakest link in your server farm).  We currently have VM's in a 12 server environment:

2 Gateway servers - 1 is VM and the other will be converted in a month or so
1 Primary Content Manager - currently physical but to be converted to VM in a month or so
1 BI App server - currently physical and will change to VM at EOL
1 Secondary CM/BI App server - currently physical and will change to VM at EOL
2 EP App servers - physical and will change to VM at EOL
3 EP Job servers - 1 physical (and will change to VM at EOL) and 2 VM's
2 Planning Web servers - VM's

Our database layer is on poly serves and managed by the DBA's.

Jeff

[SomeClown]

I've seen it that slow on VM - sometimes means an underprovisioned host.  The chipset you're looking for is Nehalem (Intel) or later: it was tuned to perform better with virtualized machines.

Not much you can do - it's likely that you'll hear that there's nothing wrong in the environment, they cannot find anything that show a bottleneck, etc, etc, despite the large change in performance.  I seen virtualized implementations that are outperformed by a single laptop.

Some VM deployments run quite well with near matching performance to physical specs so it's not inherent to the Cognos software.  Planning does have some extraordinary demands on resources (like L2 cache) so performance can vary widely based on the underlying host and configuration.