On Wed, Dec 02, 2015 at 02:40:48PM -0200, Felipe Gomes wrote: > I'm kinda worried with the performance: the host is a Dell R815 4 CPU > Opteron 6136 / 64GB. There are no other VMs at the moment, just a single > stance of OpenBSD 5.8 installed, 4 virtual CPUs, 8 GB RAM. > > I've already enabled softdep on fstab, however it's taking more than 45 > minutes to compile the kernel (no modifications, GENERIC and GENERIC.MP > aswell, and no installation -- I'm just doing this to benchmark). > > Two hours ago I've started the make build and it seems its stalled on the > cleaning phase yet. > > I don't think this is right... > > If needed, I can provide dmesg or any other information related to this. > > Once again, thanks a lot.
I'm not sure how much you've worked with VMware ESXi before but does this host have a battery backed RAID controller configured? If you're using a single SATA disk or even a RAID array without battery backed cache, all caching is disabled and all disk access will be extremely slow (I forget all the exact details now). This can be mitigated for the most part by using an SSD but the best performance is definitely with a battery backed RAID controller. I've used LSI SAS9261-8i with the appropriate BBU module very successfully with my own custom ESXi servers with excellent success. As far as OpenBSD on ESXi goes, I've never personally had any issues except for an issue five years ago where a NetApp filer would run some maintenance routines at 2am which caused the NFS-backed datastore to not respond briefly and that caused OpenBSD VMs to sense something was wrong at the filesystem level and panic. Just before I arrived on the scene, the change had been made for the ESXi hosts to connect to the NetApp filer using NFS rather than Fibre Channel and I think this change made a big difference but wasn't able to fully prove this out. Otherwise, I've used OpenBSD VMs on ESXi 4, 5, 5.5, and 6 without issue using direct attached storage (LSI SAS9261-8i with BBU and 4-8 drives in RAID 10) and also with SSDs temporarily in some cases. I'm happy for the more precise information in this thread regarding some of the VM settings but I've mostly used the defaults and also found that the vmt(4) driver tends to change my OpenBSD/amd64 VMs to show as "FreeBSD 32-bit" although I normally select "Other 64-bit" although this seems to have no functional change that I have observed. Bryan
