Poor performance of Domino HTTP server on VMware ESX 3.0 and 3.5

If the same application is accessed with the Notes client, the performance is acceptable and the application appear to function properly.

IBM Lotus Support has confirmed the problem and verified it is not introduced by a Domino server misconfiguration. In fact, the same settings allow the Domino server to serve HTTP requests in a timely fashion and support heavy load when running on a physical server, while response time increases considerably when the same Domino server runs in a Virtual Machine on VMware ESX 3.0 and 3.5.

If your Domino HTTP server experiences the same issue, report the issue to VMware Support and provide the file generated by the command vm-support -s while the performance problem is happening (Domino HTTP server is under load). This will ensure that VMware is aware of this issue and will allow to provide higher priority to it for further investigation. As noted above, you can reference VMware PR (Problem Report) 318726.

For one particular customer, VMware analyzed the performance of this customer's application and found that multiple VM with a single vCPU assigned could perform and scale better that a single VM with multiple vCPUs. In order for this to work correctly, however, it requires the use of an IP sprayer or Load Balancer to redirect the HTTP request to each individual server.

This Technote will be updated as more details become available,

(Note: vm-support is a VMware script that needs to be run on the VMware ESX server's console as root.)