Marek isn't sure that "ionice"ing a VMware Windows machine is a good idea, but suddenly the whole server is a lot more responsive.

A Windows machine doing lots of page-file manipulation is causing IO starvation. This is a well-known problem with virtualisation, and something to be avoided where possible. In an effort to be able to administer the server and sort out the problem I attempted to run ionice -c2 -n7 -pXXX and the result was a lower loadavg and more responsiveness in the other VMs. Now to fix the thrashing VM…