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

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