Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Mini Gentoo in VMWare
Your slowness could be due to not telling vmware to allocate all memory into physical memory, and not using a full sized disk image. It seems like vmware accesses the blocks directly, when you pre-allocate. And if the image gets fragmented, vmware warns you about it, so that you can ask it to defragment it. But, if you're using a resizable image, then you may see some slowness. I bench marked the disk running gentoo linux on a Dell D820 notebook, in native mode. I copied that same gentoo over to a VM, and ran into in windows on the same D820 Notebook, and got slightly better performance results, by about 2-5 M/sec. I used bonnie++ -c 5 -s 4096 -r 768 -u someone. I haven't tried it on a dynamically re-sizable disk. These results indicate to me that VMware is using direct block access, and bypassing the file system. Either that, or simply keeping it un-fragmented makes a big difference. ! As far as compiling slower, I've found there is a very MINOR difference between a real machine, and a VM. On 11/7/06, Daevid Vincent [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I use a Gentoo VM for a lot of LAMP dev work, and I can tell you it's kind of painful to upgrade packages with all the compiling. VMWare is slower than normal to compile, mostly due to disk I/O. Since each HD is a big-ass file. A few optimizations I might suggest: Partition a dedicated physical hard drive into chunks and use VMWare's raw disk so you have real hardware/hard disks. I'd suggest a very fast SCSI drive for the best performance since you're running several VMs. Also, look into the VMWare server version which uses the raw iron a bit better as it's dedicated to running many VMs. I find that more RAM on VMWare has a point of deminishing returns. I have a VM that I dedicate 512MB of my 2GBs and honestly it feels slower than when I give it 128-256MB only. It may be a WinXP thing that it's not efficiently using the RAM right or something. -Original Message- From: Trenton Adams [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 05, 2006 9:19 PM To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Mini Gentoo in VMWare Yes, VMWare is fit for the task, simply because I would be using it on a windows machine. Unless there is something better for a windows machine? Thanks for the hints. On 11/3/06, Harm Geerts [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Friday 03 November 2006 06:43, Trenton Adams wrote: Hi Guys, Has anyone here played with minimalizing everything for use in vmware? Basically what I want to do is create a series of VERY tiny VMs that are all independent of each other, which provide one service. For instance, I might put apache on one VM, and tomcat on another, and so on. Obviously, I would want their memory usage to be absolutely minimized, seeing that I would like to run them all on one computer. I would probably provide them 64M-128M of RAM each, for their specific service. Perhaps a little more if really required. Is there really anything that I should worry about? Perhaps I should just DO IT? Nick[1] made a post about minimizing Gentoo a while back. But that topic was mainly about the disk usage. I suppose you would benefit from a system that uses the -Os flag to create small binairies. But do you think vmware is fit for such a task? vmware is a big strain on resources itself. You might want to have a look at xen[2] instead. [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/160899/focus=160903 [2] http://www.xensource.com/xen/xen/index.html -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
RE: [gentoo-user] Re: Mini Gentoo in VMWare
I use a Gentoo VM for a lot of LAMP dev work, and I can tell you it's kind of painful to upgrade packages with all the compiling. VMWare is slower than normal to compile, mostly due to disk I/O. Since each HD is a big-ass file. A few optimizations I might suggest: Partition a dedicated physical hard drive into chunks and use VMWare's raw disk so you have real hardware/hard disks. I'd suggest a very fast SCSI drive for the best performance since you're running several VMs. Also, look into the VMWare server version which uses the raw iron a bit better as it's dedicated to running many VMs. I find that more RAM on VMWare has a point of deminishing returns. I have a VM that I dedicate 512MB of my 2GBs and honestly it feels slower than when I give it 128-256MB only. It may be a WinXP thing that it's not efficiently using the RAM right or something. -Original Message- From: Trenton Adams [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 05, 2006 9:19 PM To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Mini Gentoo in VMWare Yes, VMWare is fit for the task, simply because I would be using it on a windows machine. Unless there is something better for a windows machine? Thanks for the hints. On 11/3/06, Harm Geerts [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Friday 03 November 2006 06:43, Trenton Adams wrote: Hi Guys, Has anyone here played with minimalizing everything for use in vmware? Basically what I want to do is create a series of VERY tiny VMs that are all independent of each other, which provide one service. For instance, I might put apache on one VM, and tomcat on another, and so on. Obviously, I would want their memory usage to be absolutely minimized, seeing that I would like to run them all on one computer. I would probably provide them 64M-128M of RAM each, for their specific service. Perhaps a little more if really required. Is there really anything that I should worry about? Perhaps I should just DO IT? Nick[1] made a post about minimizing Gentoo a while back. But that topic was mainly about the disk usage. I suppose you would benefit from a system that uses the -Os flag to create small binairies. But do you think vmware is fit for such a task? vmware is a big strain on resources itself. You might want to have a look at xen[2] instead. [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/160899/focus=160903 [2] http://www.xensource.com/xen/xen/index.html -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Mini Gentoo in VMWare
Yes, VMWare is fit for the task, simply because I would be using it on a windows machine. Unless there is something better for a windows machine? Thanks for the hints. On 11/3/06, Harm Geerts [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Friday 03 November 2006 06:43, Trenton Adams wrote: Hi Guys, Has anyone here played with minimalizing everything for use in vmware? Basically what I want to do is create a series of VERY tiny VMs that are all independent of each other, which provide one service. For instance, I might put apache on one VM, and tomcat on another, and so on. Obviously, I would want their memory usage to be absolutely minimized, seeing that I would like to run them all on one computer. I would probably provide them 64M-128M of RAM each, for their specific service. Perhaps a little more if really required. Is there really anything that I should worry about? Perhaps I should just DO IT? Nick[1] made a post about minimizing Gentoo a while back. But that topic was mainly about the disk usage. I suppose you would benefit from a system that uses the -Os flag to create small binairies. But do you think vmware is fit for such a task? vmware is a big strain on resources itself. You might want to have a look at xen[2] instead. [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/160899/focus=160903 [2] http://www.xensource.com/xen/xen/index.html -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-user] Re: Mini Gentoo in VMWare
In order to create very tiny vms, I suggest you use lfs instead. Gentoo is harder to do so. 2006/11/3, Trenton Adams [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hi Guys, Has anyone here played with minimalizing everything for use in vmware? Basically what I want to do is create a series of VERY tiny VMs that are all independent of each other, which provide one service. For instance, I might put apache on one VM, and tomcat on another, and so on. Obviously, I would want their memory usage to be absolutely minimized, seeing that I would like to run them all on one computer. I would probably provide them 64M-128M of RAM each, for their specific service. Perhaps a little more if really required. Is there really anything that I should worry about? Perhaps I should just DO IT? -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-user] Re: Mini Gentoo in VMWare
On Friday 03 November 2006 06:43, Trenton Adams wrote: Hi Guys, Has anyone here played with minimalizing everything for use in vmware? Basically what I want to do is create a series of VERY tiny VMs that are all independent of each other, which provide one service. For instance, I might put apache on one VM, and tomcat on another, and so on. Obviously, I would want their memory usage to be absolutely minimized, seeing that I would like to run them all on one computer. I would probably provide them 64M-128M of RAM each, for their specific service. Perhaps a little more if really required. Is there really anything that I should worry about? Perhaps I should just DO IT? Nick[1] made a post about minimizing Gentoo a while back. But that topic was mainly about the disk usage. I suppose you would benefit from a system that uses the -Os flag to create small binairies. But do you think vmware is fit for such a task? vmware is a big strain on resources itself. You might want to have a look at xen[2] instead. [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/160899/focus=160903 [2] http://www.xensource.com/xen/xen/index.html -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
