Hello, I was hoping someone could answers some questions for me. I'm running vSphere 4.0 with about 5 32-bit Linux guests running kernel 2.4. All have 1 vCPU. Everything has been fine for years but now with the growth of one of the web server machines it seems to get bogged down easily and I've tried everything to speed it up. I get load spikes easily and have concluded the guest does not have enough CPU resources to keep it consistent anymore. I've allotted more memory to the guest and tried to provide more CPU shares but I'm not getting far. The physical server (Dell Poweredge R610 with two E5520/2.26GHZ CPU's) is not a slow machine and the other guests are perfectly fine and load values don't go above .5 for them.
1) Would adding one or more vCPUs to this existing linux guest help speed it up at all. What is the best way to do this? Just increase the number in the VM settings?
2) If I add more vCPUs should I be recompiling the Kernel with SMP support? Should I also recompile Apache afterwards?
3) How do I check what the guest is currently set to for "CPU/MMU Virtualization"? In the settings for the VM its only set to automatic so I don't know what it ends up being.