I've been using VMware server since the GSX 3.0 days... I've had it running on a personal server for a few years now(since v1.0). I noticed recently the VMs I have running have become increasingly sluggish over time. Today I decided to stop them both and restart VMware, and restart the VMs. Performance is back to normal now.
Using historical performance metrics I traced it to the last time I rebooted, when I upgraded to VMware server 2.0.2. Normally the CPU usage on my host is just a few %. The VMs are really idle. There are two of them, it's a dual socket single core system with 6GB of ram, each VM has 1.5GB assigned to it. Everything is 32-bit.
You can see from these graphs, taken from the day before I rebooted until today, the linear increase in CPU usage and load average over time, was wondering if anyone else has seen this on their systems -
The guest VMs for the most part are/were completely idle, the only thing using CPU on the host was vmware-vmx processes. I noticed that the vmware-hostd process got stuck at some point(wouldn't respond, management UI was unresponsive even after restarting the vmware-mgmt service), perhaps related..
I'm working on possibly migrating these VMs to the a Terremark vCloud, so maybe won't have to worry too much about this longer term.
The trend is too linear to be a coincidence to me.