While benchmarking the disk on a Windows XP VM under XenServer 5.6 I get a peak for a couple of seconds to ~200 MB/s before it drops back to an average of 30 MB/s. Is this normal?
My configuration is: HP blade server BL460 with 1 quad-core Intel Xeon processor (2.66GHz), 24 GBs of ram, and two 300GB 10K SAS SFF hard drives forming a RAID 1 array. My dom0 has 10 XP VMs and 2 Windows 2003 R2 VMs.
I that realize I'm going to get slow results using a RAID 1 array with 2 drives, which is why later on tonight I'm upgrading it to a RAID 10 with 4 drives and hope for much better results. Is that a reasonable hope?
I've already followed every bit of advice there is about VM performance improvement, for example: disabling task and checksum offload.