Jake Vickers wrote:
On 02/27/2010 12:08 PM, MagicWISP Sales wrote:
Yes the old server was a Quad PII - 4 Intel 400Mhz processors, it ran
like a
champ with QMT, Apache, Bind, and FreeRadius. As soon as the Apache,
Bind,
and QMT were rolled into VMWare -it became a dog. I used about every
tweak
I could find on the internet to make it work better. I think the
problem is
VMWare Server 2 - it's just slow. Unfortunately I could not use Xen
or KVM
because of the old processors. From what I could research, they would
have
worked much better. I am pretty anxious to see how this runs on another
server with dual Intel 3.Ghz processors. Unfortunately they aren't dual
core, but we should still see some marked improvement.
I'm actually testing/using VirtualBox for things right now. I think in
the long run that running a large mailserver on any virtual environment
is a bad idea.
Keyword: large. (Please be a little more specific)
I'm not inclined to accept this premise yet. It's certain that any host
needs to be adjusted in certain ways to run efficiently as a guest.
Achieving high performance in a virtual guest will also likely require
the latest innovations in virtualization hardware (paravirtualization).
With a QMT guest, the need for paravirtualization hardware is appearing
to me to be more of a certainty in order to reach high levels of
efficiency, but I'm not positive about this yet - just a hunch. BL, I
wouldn't throw in the towel on QMT virtualization in a "large"
environment quite yet. (And to be clear, virtualized QMTs appears to be
working nicely in small to medium environments at this point).
Of course any host is going to run faster on bare iron. The question is,
how much of a performance hit are you willing to give up to gain the
benefits of virtualization? This is not a one size fits all situation.
I heard a fellow say yesterday that with VirtualBox you take a 50%
performance hit on the guest. I don't think I'd find that acceptable
that in any case. I expect though that this is with no tuning, and that
with some tuning that hit can be reduced. I haven't tried out VirtualBox
yet, so I'm glad Jake's doing so. My impression though is that
VirtualBox is stronger (grew out of) the desktop application arena, and
is being retro-fitted for server applications. On the other hand, VMware
started with servers and grew into desktops. This is largely why I
expect that VMware Server will continue to be better suited to server
virtualization than VB. That could change with time, but I'm not
expecting it any time soon, especially with Oracle-Sun merger.
I'll need to verify, but I think even the "big official" mail server
packages are not supported if run in virtual environment and probably
for reasons like this.
I can think of other reasons that I think are more likely. ;)
--
-Eric 'shubes'
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