Hello,
Hoping that someone can point me in the right direction...
Summary of environment:
HP DL385 Dual Processor server, Opteron 2.4Ghz Processors
16GB Ram
1.2TB Disks - 300GB - RAID 1 and 900GB - RAID 5
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition - Host OS
Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition - Guest OS
Each guest server has 3.6GB Ram allocated
VMWare Server Beta 3 as are the VMWare Tools on guest servers
Time Synchronisation enabled through VMWare tools on client
Disk Subsystem of server:
2 * 300GB disks RAID 1 = Host OS, Guest OS, SMS Log Files,
4 * 300GB disks RAID 5 = Host SMS Data, Guest Data, Spooler Location
Host Server is also running SMS & SQL
Guest servers - Domain Controller and another File and Print
The Problems:
1) The host OS and the guest OS are running and responding in a timely fashion but if I should reboot one of the guest servers the rebooting server remains at the 'Starting Windows' screen for a very long time. At this same time the performance of the other guest server is so poor it is unsuable. If you are to click on the Start button, if the menu comes up within 5 minutes you are lucky. The performance of the host server slows as well with 100% processor usage. Perfmon details that the averag disk queue length is fine, the only item running at 100% is the CPU Utilisation. When you look at Task Manager there are two vmware server services running, one for each server, and they will be each using 50% of the total processor time thus giving us 100% processor usage time.
I have that if I need to reboot one of the guests that the easiest way to do accomplish this is to shut down the host server and the specified options through the VMware Console are on Host shutdown to shutdown the guest server gracefully.
Once the host is rebooted the performance of all 3 servers is fantastic.
2) Overall Performance if the servers are left for sometime also degrades on the guest servers. I have setup the servers to have their time synchronised using VMWare server and configure NTPClient now as well due to NTP errors in the eventlog. I am no longer using the VMWare Console, rather RDP based on other articles posted here.
If anyone can assist with these problems or are experiencing similar problems I would like to hear from you. Should you require additional information please feel free to contact me.
Thanks 
Andrew.