Paul Lange wrote: >> Performance will not be very good until you have Windows PV disk/net drivers. >> > > Just how bad is "not very good" here? > > >> 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. >> > > How large? > > I'm thinking of slicing up a X4150 into Solaris zones & XP xVMs to service > about a half dozen sysadmins & Java developers with Sun Ray clients. The > idea is that they use the Solaris side for primary tool support with some > software running in the XP xVM(s) and accessed via RDP. > > Also, some server support software is expected to run on the Solaris zones to > support the sysadmins and developers. VCS, bug tracker, maybe a couple > others with relatively small footprint. And I had in mind to do this all > elegantly with ZFS backing for the obvious reasons. > > Would the performance of the XP xVM(s) not stand up to this kind of use? Am > I trying to do too much with one box? > > > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > xen-discuss mailing list > [email protected] >
This is just based on experience, but the performance is terrible, even on a Ultra-20 M2 with 2.6GHz AMD Opteron 1218, 2GB ram, allocated 1GB to the guest. The major issue is mouse synchronization, the performance is comparable to Qemu running fully emulated. It's somewhat usable, enough to install the system and a few programs, but hardly usable for development or testing. Until drivers that fix the networking and disk support are out, it's just how it is. Right now it's nothing comparable to native or VMware. RDP is the preferred access method, for performance reasons, VNC just doesn't cut it, and the console is not usable for anything but installing. For your proposed setup, I'd recommend hosting something like Windows Server 2003 with 2GB ram on xVM and use terminal services, depending on what you host, may need more. Multiple VM's will be VERY painful, if you can help it, don't do it! The one issue to watch out for is disk i/o with 6 users, if you have a dedicated disk it'll help a lot. You're not necessarily trying to do too much with one machine, it's just a problem right now, things will get better quickly, but I can't give you an eta because I don't work directly with the xVM team. If you need hardware recommendations and can afford it, a dual socket Opteron system such as the Ultra 40 would be the preferred host. If you can help it, running multiple VM's per core is not ideal, and it won't be usable if you do so. One VM per socket is the only way to do it without pain. PS: Sorry that I didn't CC xen-discuss at the first e-mail, I made a typo :-o James _______________________________________________ xen-discuss mailing list [email protected]
