Best practices for tuning virtual hosts

Question

While digging around to find resources on tuning virtual hosts I found an article on VMWares knowledgebase about changing the I/O scheduler.

What else should be considered for improving performance/reliability? Are there any community guides (VMWare, Redhat?) that detail such settings?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 13 '13 at 08:24

I have a lot of experience regarding this, this are my suggestions:

Use VMWare Tools
Disable unnecessary services from your host
Use paravirtualized hardware where possible.
If you really don't need access time updates (on your partition), then disable it.
As you said, change the scheduler on noop
Try to play with overcommit memory and swappines
When you create the VM choose for a fully allocated disk
Use VM snapshots only if necessary

http://lonesysadmin.net/linux-virtual-machine-tuning-guide/
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere4.0.pdf http://communities.vmware.com/thread/146002

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