Most people like to think of virtual environments as highly sophisticated areas that are largely immune to minor problems. The truth, unfortunately, is that tiny mistakes in these environments are often responsible for the largest problems. It’s worth considering how some of the following mistakes—as benign as they might sound—could actually be causing big problems. That’s why your virtual machines are under-performing.
Screensavers
Just about everyone has a screensaver. Unfortunately, they can also be a huge drain on processor resources. Even the most insignificant versions—those pipes that crawl all over your screen—are consuming some percentage of your processor power.
Although that might not seem like a lot all by itself, consider that a single virtual environment might have as many as 15 machines operating on a single host at the same time. If your virtual environment utilizes hosted desktops via virtual implementation, we have bad news: screensavers are probably an even bigger problem.
Managing from a Console
This mistake is so common that even IT administrators are known to commit it. There are a number of ways this can happen too. For example, you might manage the components of your infrastructure by remoting and logging into to servers individually. Another common mistake is checking domain name server settings from its console. These are just two examples of one big mistake.
Each time you manage from the console, an Explorer shell needs to be created and maintained. Logging into a virtual machine is already hard enough on its processor utilization. Creating a shell on top of that can really increase processor utilization when logging in or out. There are a number of tools out there (Microsoft has some of the best) that will allow you to virtually manage your machines without wasting a lot of processing power.
Antivirus and Antimalware Software Scanning Disc Files
Obviously, you want to make sure your Virtual Machine Disk Format files and those of your Virtual Hard Disk are free of both viruses and malware. However, know that real-time scanning of these files can greatly reduce their overall performance. Be sure to exclude them from any such scanning and schedule them instead.
Working in a virtual environment comes with all kinds of benefits. There are some factors you need to consider so that your machines don’t underperform. At ServerPronto, we can also help you find ways to get more from your virtual machines.
ServerPronto offers the best affordable and secure hosting service in all dedicated server packages.
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Four mistakes that can kill virtual machine performance
Photo cred: Flickr /Â jaypeg
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