01.11.07
Making Microsoft Virtual Server Play Nice With Others
Microsoft Virtual Server actually works pretty well for a Windows based solution. I won’t go into too much detail here but we do run several virtual servers on this platform. Performance is acceptable for mid-sized loads. I learned the hard way today that MSVS will happily over allocate resources if you don’t configure it correctly. If you are running anything in production on this platform, I highly recommend you tune your configuration to avoid a problem we experienced. When setting your resource allocations, make sure you set every virtual server to use less than 100% of any particular resource. If you set it at 100% or more for any single server, that server can (and will) be a greedy little Windows pig and slurp it all up. This is a problem when the other virtual server is under any sort of load and can’t allocate the resources it needs. I recommend not setting any server over 90% of your cpu, and 80% of your ram. You’ll thank me when one client runs a cpu intensive batch job and your other client’s DON’T call you with complaints.