> Performance will not be very good until you have
> Windows PV disk/net drivers. I'm not sure when we
> will have publicly available Windows PV drivers

Performance is not _that_ bad, at least I feel so. This Windows boots up fine, 
in about 30 seconds. Okay, far from perfect :)), but still, not bad.
Do you have at least an estimate when PV drivers might arrive? (say 2008 Q1, or 
maybe in 6 months, or maybe sooner? Just curious.)

> 
> I would not recommend moving to zfs with only 1G
> of ram to be shared between dom0 and any guests.
> It's really meant for larger systems.

Yeah, _I_ know that, but the owner wants everything, but gives.... a little 
less :) He even speaks about having some 30 instances of mssql on that HVM 
Windows... I recommended him to buy a few 8GB ECC modules :))

> 
> On a small system like this, you might want to
> start with Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) and then
> migrate to zfs when you go to a bigger system.
> zfs gives you a lot more functionality, but SVM
> is small and runs as fast as a native slice/disk
> in dom0. You should be able to dd the disk image
> from a svm volume to a disk file to a zvol and
> move it around at will as long as the size
> matches (I haven't done it myself though).

Okay, I'll give it a shot. I'd stick to zfs, because of it's simplicity and 
features, but it needs more memory, I know.
Somehow I always had hw raid, or zfs (lately). I don't have much experience 
with svm, but I dont't think it's _that_ complicated :))

> 
> You should also be shutting everything down
> that you can on dom0. e.g. X windows, etc.

Sure.
Probably I missed something, but how can I get to the HVM's console from, say 
an other win, on the same lan? vnc to dom0? I don't think so. vnc to domU?
It isn't trivial to administer Windows from the command line... :)

> 
> On a side note, I have been playing with a
> script which builds a minimal dom0 which runs
> out of a ramdisk. ramdisk is about 80M compressed
> and takes about ~ 280M of memory for the disk
> when running. Good for booting of a USB stick,
> compact flash, etc. Other than the ramdisk, it
> has a pretty small memory footprint so it almost
> makes up for the ramdisk.. I need to clean it
> up and send it out for folks to play with/improve...

Ummm... sounds interesting!
Think of me as a volunteer! :)

> 
> You would have to similar tricks that you do today
> with windows when moving to a bigger disk.. e.g.
> create
> a new larger disk, copy the old disk to the larger
> disk, use partition magic to grow the partition.

Yes, that was my idea too. Okay.

> 
> It doesn't hurt having multiple disks...

Not at all!

> 
> In the near'ish future, it may even make sense to
> export a zfs filesystem via cifs from the dom0
> and have the windows domain net mount some of the
> disks depending on you performance requirements.
> You would need PV drivers of course.

I was actually considering something similar, only with samba :)


> 
> See this thread..
> 
> ttp://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=1
> 66817
> 

Great thread, thanks! I planned that I let the server compress the win image in 
the night hours, and put it in a samba-shared directory, and from there a win 
client machine pulls down, and maybe writes to dvd (or directly to dvd-ram). 
This way the data leaves the server. 
It's almost the same theory as a zfs send/receive! Whoa I invented the wheel! 
:))

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> MRJ
> 
> 

Thanks for the great support, and all the work!

Attila
 
 
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