Hello everyone,
First thanks to all the great resources I could find here setting up my first TF2 server.
I was reading a lot about bad performance on vmware and to avoid it. Unfortunately I have a box which needs to run vmware (theres a Solaris guest) and I wanted ESXI for better manageability (Dell Poweredge 1950 Server) .
I had the problems many people her described, especially really nasty lag spikes.
After compiling a bunch of Linux kernels and playing with the settings, I came to the following (intermediate) solution of getting the best out of the box than possible under this circumstances.
Guest OS is latest Gentoo Linux, 2.6 kernel. VMWare platform the latest ESXi. Hardware 2x Dual Core Xeons 3 GHz, 4 Gigs RAM. VMWare tools installed, but not the vmxnet driver - using e1000 network driver instead.
What I did to optimize things was:
1. Use a tickless kernel - this fixed a lot
2. Configure Kernel for low latency Desktop system
3. Assign the Guest dedicated CPUs to avoid vCPU switching
4. on the shell:
root@host# echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
"Swappiness" is the tendency of the kernel to swap out idle processes to disk. It can be between 0 and 100. 0 means the kernel will not or hardly ever attempt to put stuff on swap space.
5. Configured Kernel to use VMI extensions for better performance under VMWare
6. Installed VMWare tools (Of course a must on a Linux guest)
I hope I could help a bit with these hints - maybe others have more good ideas how to optimize a Linux guest on ESXi for srcds.
(Don't use VMWare Server or workstation for game servers).
If anyone wants to test the server: 81.2.189.182:27015
Mapchanges take very long sometimes and its not perfect, but still enjoyable.
Server is sometimes down when I work on it, but should usually be on 24/7.
Cheers
McK.
First thanks to all the great resources I could find here setting up my first TF2 server.
I was reading a lot about bad performance on vmware and to avoid it. Unfortunately I have a box which needs to run vmware (theres a Solaris guest) and I wanted ESXI for better manageability (Dell Poweredge 1950 Server) .
I had the problems many people her described, especially really nasty lag spikes.
After compiling a bunch of Linux kernels and playing with the settings, I came to the following (intermediate) solution of getting the best out of the box than possible under this circumstances.
Guest OS is latest Gentoo Linux, 2.6 kernel. VMWare platform the latest ESXi. Hardware 2x Dual Core Xeons 3 GHz, 4 Gigs RAM. VMWare tools installed, but not the vmxnet driver - using e1000 network driver instead.
What I did to optimize things was:
1. Use a tickless kernel - this fixed a lot
2. Configure Kernel for low latency Desktop system
3. Assign the Guest dedicated CPUs to avoid vCPU switching
4. on the shell:
root@host# echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
"Swappiness" is the tendency of the kernel to swap out idle processes to disk. It can be between 0 and 100. 0 means the kernel will not or hardly ever attempt to put stuff on swap space.
5. Configured Kernel to use VMI extensions for better performance under VMWare
6. Installed VMWare tools (Of course a must on a Linux guest)
I hope I could help a bit with these hints - maybe others have more good ideas how to optimize a Linux guest on ESXi for srcds.
(Don't use VMWare Server or workstation for game servers).
If anyone wants to test the server: 81.2.189.182:27015
Mapchanges take very long sometimes and its not perfect, but still enjoyable.
Server is sometimes down when I work on it, but should usually be on 24/7.
Cheers
McK.
