-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Josh Archambault wrote:
I'm fairly confident that using anything other than the default "e1000" network device with 64-bit guests is discouraged by VMWare.
It would appear that you're correct. Though the documentation does not make that clear, I do find this point made in their forums.
At the very least, e1000 is what new 64-bit guests default to, and I've personally had plenty of success using the "em" driver with all sorts of 64-bit *BSD guests in this configuration.
Likewise, I'm using the e1000 with em, and it's fine. There is known to be a non-trivial difference in measured (though not necessarily real-world) performance between vmxnet and e1000 on 32 bit guests, so all else being equal, one would naturally prefer vmxnet. I didn't realize that this did not necessarily generalize to 64 bit guests. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
In other news, for the benefit of anyone else using this combination of OS and hypervisor:
I discovered a severe performance problem, wherein an OpenBSD guest would run fine for some period of hours, and then become horribly bogged down during disk operations, to the point of unusability. This was true even when the guest was nearly idle and the VM host had abundant uncommitted resources, and was equally true on 32 bit and 64 bit OpenBSD guests.
This was a showstopper, but the problem appears to have been "resolved" by lying to the hypervisor. Since I told it that the guest was "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 64 bit", instead of "Other 64 bit", the problem has so far not recurred.
Cheers -d - -- David Talkington [email protected] - -- PGP key: http://www.flyingjoke.org/keys/801E3976.asc iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJJuAquAAoJEO7jL1CAHjl2WTAH/R4SndPEO7Rsn3PhbTm+GsWo vGMo45ZKgxOhuz4eLQVBQvqC46ON7aISshXTly8zGzumEbi2rFbHdFT91A+02Et7 NvURrLv0mMgt38jwsE68NX/dfOfI7ycoNylI9Yi52+dh6d7ldidlV7LCWN6TxLB9 iMouIlUTHu+I/3rtlWYGIQHa0Myvgtb7yKED6npvwEAU70UwQ3xIEP+aRRD2rzVp BfHRWjuJGj/2RKmvy31sgh6VNRckM5NWaXByJNsNdtE2bEqNI2/Fy1dOzvkYUs9Z k5sjUAZXWJ9r66kMWiSs7k8bqtRICcyiVsnNPQAt50gB8sQBdGlHlU0tiXt0YZg= =QiyD -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
