For my personal, development and testing purposes I am running around ten Linux virtual machines. Those are mainly based on RedHat Enteprise Linux / CentOS version 5. The virtualization platform setup is nothing close to exclusive – an IBM x345 server running VMware ESXi 3.5, custom-made NAS box based on OpenSolaris with ZFS. All together, the setup is not pouring extensive amount of computing resources, neither I/O performance. Therefore, good optimization of whatever possible is pretty much required and I like to experiment in this field too.

In this post I will not go deep into overall performance tuning stuff I have done on the ESX and storage side, but will focus more on the Linux OS tips, that personally for me makes some difference comparing to running a standard installation. Continue reading “Performance tuning Linux virtual machine” »