Greetings!
I have a bit of a dilemma here in what I believe to be an inappropriate use of VMware (ESXi). In short, VMware is playing host to multiple file servers in a DFS arrangement with said file servers hosting 3D CAD files that up to 600 users may be accessing at any one time.
Servers: Dell R710 with 24 x 1.9Ghz cores, 128 gig memory
Storage: EMC VNX on 8Gb fiber via a Cisco MDS switch
Networking: 2 x 10Gb Ethernet into a pair of Cisco Nexus 7000 chassis
VMware ESXi 5.0
The issue: CPU usage on the DFS servers is very high. Load is spread as granularly as possible while staying reasonable for the folder structure. We are also seeing weird permissions issues cropping up on the hosted folders (user had permissions 1 day, doesn't the next is one issue, folders becoming totally inaccessable - even to admins - is another). We never saw these permissions issues on the previous storage (NetApp SAN with CIFS sharing). Performance on these DFS servers is also highly inconsistent (one day, it will be OK, the next it may crawl) from the users perspective. The DFS servers are in their own resource group. The individual servers are configured with 2 x vCPU and 4 gig memory.
I seem to remember reading from back in the 4.x days that high I/O loads really didn't belong in a VMware farm. Would this application be classified as a "high I/O load"? Would this concern still be relevent today with 5.0?
Thanks!
Ron