Gabriele Bulfon wrote:
I suspected my best choice to be xVM.
If you are spending a lot of time in the kernel, perhaps. Don't underestimate VirtualBox though - it's a pretty tough little creature :-)
You mentioned earlier that you were running an older version of vbox. You might give 3.1.4 a try. I've been running it successfully since it was released a couple of weeks ago, and it's predecessor 3.1.2 for as long as it's been available. Except for SMP Solaris guests, I'm pretty happy with the results.
For the best performance, make sure and install the guest additions. If your hardware supports VT-x/AMD-V then make sure they are on in the BIOS and tell vbox to use them. If you have hardware support for nested page tables, make sure and turn that on too. My test systems are core i7 920s and they also support VPIDs. I also make sure they are on.
For your Windows guests, you might consider using virt-io net for your networking configuration and install the KVM pv drivers. I am using a bridged network configuration and my guests are getting pretty good network performance (near wire speed and no detectable latencies). I also make heavy use of internal-only network for machine to machine communications, like sharing NFS file systems.
Is it ready for production? Will I have any Solaris kernel difference by running the xvm kernel? I will need to run some parts of my softwares inside the host (ipfilter, bacula, named, etc).
Are you asking for dom0 or a domU ? For the domU, Solaris (meaning Solaris 10 here) is run as an HVM guest, so there are no kernel differences. If you are running a fairly recent Solaris 10 update, it will detect that you are running as an HVM machine and use the PV disk and network drivers, making it a PV/HVM hybrid - sort of the best of both worlds. It runs pretty well in this configuration.
As for the dom0, you are running a pv OpenSolaris kernel (there is no PV Solaris). For the items you listed, there shouldn't be any noticeable differences. Your differences here will be OpenSolaris vs Solaris and where a few things have moved around and modernized (quite a bit).
About w2k3: why does 2k8 runs better than 2k3 on virtual? I will check, surely.
PV disk and network drivers maybe ? Can't help you there - don't spend much time in the Windows side of things, other than setting up test machines for various purposes.
Bob _______________________________________________ xen-discuss mailing list [email protected]
