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Certain applications might perform poorly when run in a NetWare guest
Details
I have some applications that require intensive disk I/O, such as virus scanning. Running these applications in a NetWare guest operating system on ESX exhibits poor performance compared to running natively on a NetWare server or comparable workload in a Linux or Windows guest operating system. Why is that?
Solution
Certain applications in a NetWare guest on ESX 2.5.x may incur high CPU virtualization overhead. Such applications running under NetWare require some additional overhead for binary translation by the VMware monitor because they execute in the same protection mode as the NetWare kernel.
Intensive Disk I/O requires additional CPU resources, which add to the required overhead. In addition, due to design limitations, the virtual CPUs in NetWare guests do not idle when not in use, making VMware virtual machine scheduling decisions less efficient.
VMware has developed a CPU idler application for NetWare guests that is loaded with the VMware Tools for NetWare guests. This idler monitors NetWare kernel activity in order to notify the VMware virtual machine scheduler when it might be appropriate to interrupt the NetWare guest to schedule other active guests.
ESX Server 3.0.x introduced improvements in resources scheduling. However, the above limitations still apply to these applications and no significant improvement is observed.
Bugzilla PRs
121618
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