The system is set to allow unlimited resources. There is only two vm n the host. the host is 16 gig mem. dual quad core Dell 2950. Cpu usage goes up to almost 1gig when the databases are started. This startup takes 20 minutes longer on the virtual machine than the stand alone.

vmstat -s:
2010692 total memory
1980800 used memory
478312 active memory
1420476 inactive memory
29892 free memory
17284 buffer memory
1696180 swap cache
0 total swap
0 used swap
0 free swap
62430 non-nice user cpu ticks
308 nice user cpu ticks
13033 system cpu ticks
6971608 idle cpu ticks
336182 IO-wait cpu ticks
1212 IRQ cpu ticks
1028 softirq cpu ticks
4852443 pages paged in
1134256 pages paged out
0 pages swapped in
0 pages swapped out
19686583 interrupts
3111632 CPU context switches
1221583193 boot time
8841 forks

thanks

First:This makes no sense, lol.

Some more info would be nice:

Is standalone the host OS that is NOT running inside a virtual environment?
What VMM you using (VMware, Xen, etc)?
What is the disk setup(RAID, single disk, etc)?
How large are the databases you are starting?

When databases start up, they load the indexes into memory so that queries will be faster. So if you have a very large database, then it will take a longer time to load the indexes into memory (They will load at the speed of the disk accesses). Also, there is some overhead in a virtual machine and one of them is in disk access. The db probably takes longer to load in the VM because the disk accesses are not as efficient.

Thanks for the reply. I am new to VMware but have gone through virtualization hell with V-iron, Redhat, virtuozzo and Microsoft. Some people can't make their minds up where I work. I'll look into the disk access, that sound like it might be a logical track to follow.

This makes no sense, lol.> What I ment to say was that he cpu usage goes from about 200Mhz to almost 1 gig - this is from the performance chart of the virtual machine (not he host). So cpu usage increases.

Is stand alone the host OS that is NOT running inside a virtual environment? > Short answer = yes. The stand alone is running RedHat v3 on a Sun VZ40 server. We are running comparison test against the virtual machine.

What VMM you using (VMware, Xen, etc)? VMware ESX

What is the disk setup(RAID, single disk, etc)? Single SAN disk

How large are the databases you are starting? total about 12 gig made up of several table size 20 Meg to 500 meg.

I'm no expert on VM systems, but surely cpu freq can't change??

Vmware may be displaying cpu usage by telling how many of the cycles per second it is using. So it went from using 200MHz to 1GHz of the available cpu cycles (across all cores).

Edit: or the cpu's are throttling and they went form 200MHz to their top speed of 1GHz?

Exactly. Thanks. I looked at disk usage and see a big spike in reads during the time the test was ran. I guess this is normal since the databases are being started. I think the problem is the application itself. It has been- is and always wil be crap. It never uses swap, even on the original server, and has a very poor database engine to start with. We have seen system slow downs before and had to reboot to release memory etc.

thanks for your help.

It seems the Progress database was messed up. The before and after images had extremely large blocks which they did not need. The systems run like scalded dogs now.