In my lab environment, I prefer to have more XP VMs than Windows 7 because of the RAM and disk foot print.
After getting my lab setup, it was time to get a Windows XP image ready for deployment. I went through the typical defaults in ESXi 4.1 and created my XP install for a template. I went through the entire install process and began installing the apps this machine would use. This VM in particular needed utorrent. After getting everything setup for port forwarding, I began downloading some Ubuntu ISOs to see what kind of speeds I was getting. I had about 5 ISOs going at one time and reaching speeds around 1mb/sec down, which is normal, but then all of sudden downloads crawled to 1-10kb/sec. A red button showed up at the bottom that said "Disk Overloaded 100%". To be honest, I was pretty ticked at this point because I figured The Green Machines should definitely be able to handle this kind of transaction.
utorrent has a handy little caching feature that will save downloaded blocks into RAM so it can prevent a bunch of random reads and writes to your disks. I verified that this was enabled and everything within utorrent checked out ok.
I took a look at my Windows Task Manager and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. Some quick google searching found that the serial bus couldn't handle all the transactions going on. Most people online complained because they were trying to save to an external hard drive using USB1.1. I figured, not a problem, let me just change my SCSI driver and.... wait! Where is the SCSI adapter so I can change from BusLogic to LSI? Come to find out, doing the "typical" install of a Windows XP VM puts a hard drive on an IDE connection.
Another quick google search led me to Simon Seagrave's post VMWare ESX – Creating a Windows XP VM and getting error: "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer.". I created an updated .flp driver for the LSI Logic Parallel SCSI driver for XP called LSI_Logic_WinXP_12803.flp (which will be added to the new VM Advanced ISO soon) and created a new XP VM in custom mode making sure I chose the SCSI adapter to attach my hard drive.
After creating the new VM, I ate my own dog food and followed the directions to create a Golden Image for a properly aligned VM disk. Once that step was completed, it was time to install XP.
Attach the XP ISO to the VM and once XP asks for additional drivers, press F6. Once XP is in the stage asking for SCSI drivers, attach the LSI_Logic_WinXP_12803.flp, press S and Enter and continue on.
After doing all these steps and reloading utorrent, I began downloading the same ISOs once again and the error message of Disk Overload 100% never returned.