Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
John Oliver wrote:
Then how about VMware Server? It does not require special hardware,
nor does the OS require special drivers.
Well, actually it kinda does the moment you want to touch hardware
with anything approaching reasonable speed.
But, VMWare does full emulation ala QEmu. It emulates *everything* in
software. If you can do that, you can play a lot of tricks to make
things faster and VMWare has a lot of tricks.
Even so, it's noticeably slower than a native OS on the same hardware.
The issue is that I normally don't care. I'm running VMWare because I
need Windows or a specific Linux instance. In those cases, I'm happy
to pay the speed penalty to not have to go configure a separate piece
of hardware for something that I'm only likely to need for a specific
task.
There are several things that you can do to speed up VmWare's functions.
First of all and most importantly, memory is crucial to using VmWare on
any of the computers.
The next thing that helps is to allocate the virtual machines to run
with their unique physical partitioning instead of using the standard
disk file emulation. This decreases the actual disk manipulation
overhead significantly. Another feature requires placing these physical
partitions for your virtual machines on separate disk controllers. USB
disks don't work as well as separate physical disk internal controllers.
Of course, you rapidly stretch beyond basic PC architecture. I am
running 16 images on a Dell PowerEdge 2850 with 4 cores and 16GB of
memory using CentOS v5.1 i386 with PAE extensions. The multi-interface
network connections are a boon as well. In this computer's case, I am
running Seagate Ultra-SCSI in a RAID-5 architecture (these disks are
15,000 RPM).
The next logical extension from here would be to move to VmWare's ESX
server and run a minimal hypervisor architecture and maximize the vm's
footprint space.
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Brinkley Harrell
http://www.fusemeister.com
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