During the migration path from VMware ESXi to Proxmox VE, a few configuration items can be adjusted on the VM hardware to ensure maximum performance*
*Compared to a standard Proxmox VE VM
OS
- In the OS configration page, you're able to change the guest-OS type. Adjust this accordingly to your VMs' operating system.
- This is especially important for Windows VMs.
Disk
- We recommend the VirtIO SCSI disk type in combination with the VirtIO SCSI Single controller. This combination offers te best performance for your virtual disks.
- It is good-practice to limit your disk IOPS for your VM, this way if a machine gets out of control it doesn't affect the entire clusters' performance. We recommend a minimum of 500 IOPS, in case this server has a lot of disk operations consider increasing this limit.
- Leave the "Cache" on the setting "No Cache" as this is the safest option and prevents data loss. In case you need more disk performance, we recommend setting the cache to "Writeback Cache".
- If your storage is based on SSD / NVMe, enable the "SSD Emulation" option as it prevents the guest-OS from performing tasks meant for HDD storage.
- Enable the "Discard" option, with this the guest-OS will enable TRIM support. With this option enabled the unused / previously used storage will be removed on the hypervisor.
- We recommend to disable "IO-Thread". This option could have an impact on back-up speeds & stability, disabling this option does come at the cost of disk-IO.
CPU
- We recommend you to adjust your CPU-type to atleast the x86-64-v2-AES type (Higher Vx is recommended if your CPU supports this). The full list of which CPU supports which type can be found here.
- Configure only the amount of CPUs that your VM needs, if you configure the VM to use more CPUs than it needs it will only use extra CPU cycles.
Memory
- We recommend to leave the "Memory" and "Minimum Memory" as the same value.
- Turn on ballooning, even if you are not using this option. Proxmox uses this option to gather more accurate memory metrics within the guest-OS.
Network
- We recommend to use the Virt-IO network adapter, this provides a 10 Gbit connection between the VM and hypervisor (and also other VMs).
Additional options
*Please note! The QEMU-agent must also be enabled under VM options (disabled by default).
