I am running a Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 File Server on our network. It seems that there are many times where accessing the data from the server is really slow, sluggish, or non-responsive. Even worse yet are the issues that I have started observing when I try to run or execute an executable program or file from the network share and it takes a few minutes before it will open up on the client side. I am scared to think what would happen if we wanted to push out software installations from this file server.
We are in a mixed environment with our clients right now with some Windows XP (soon to be gone), Windows 7, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Linux Servers (CentOS and Ubuntu), and some Macintosh OS 10.6.8 and 10.7 clients. This server is a virtual server within a VMWare 4.x environment and the disk drives on the machine are iSCSI targets mapped back to a SAN. NFS is not being served off of this server for the Unix/Linux machines.
I am looking for ideas, suggestions, settings, documents, magic, anything that will help in improving the performance of this server for the files being served and the ability to run executables from the network share. I have made some adjustments per the following MS document, but it did not seem to help as much as I thought that it would. Lastly, the items mentioned here do not seem to apply to this situation.