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Using a multii processing box as a vmware server

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[H]F Junkie
Joined
Mar 31, 2001
Messages
15,181
Hi all,

Now that vmware server has been released for free, I may finally be able to help some (windows using) friends get colo space with me (and recover some of my colo costs).

Assuming I have a dual, dual core opteron (4 cores) running freebsd-64 bit, should I be able to host 3-4 virtual servers? I'm thinking of setting up a windows XP home guest OS with bf1942, another with counterstrike, and then a linux webserver (third friend likes linux, not bsd).

Anyone tried this? Should optie 265's be fast enough?
 
Oh yeah, it should be fine. You might want to run a database server on the real machine, if you can get everyone to agree on a single DB. I imagine the overhead of a single DB handling four times the load would be lower than running 4 seperate DBs in VMs. What kind of thing will you be running on these?

 
Robstar said:
Hi all,

Now that vmware server has been released for free, I may finally be able to help some (windows using) friends get colo space with me (and recover some of my colo costs).

Assuming I have a dual, sual core opteron (4 cores) running freebsd-64 bit, should I be able to host 3-4 virtual servers? I'm thinking of setting up a windows XP home guest OS with bf1942, another with counterstrike, and then a linux webserver (third friend likes linux, not bsd).

Anyone tried this? Should optie 265's be fast enough?
Click to expand...

It should work. I've got a dual 3.2GHz Xeon running 4 virtual machines. It performs well.
 
Don't forget lots of ram. I wouldn't be happy with less than 512 availabler per virtual machine, I'd want at least 1 gig available.
 
defakto said:
Don't forget lots of ram. I wouldn't be happy with less than 512 availabler per virtual machine, I'd want at least 1 gig available.
Click to expand...

I agree. I've got a Windows XP virtual machine on my Linux server, and I've only got 256MB of ram allocated to it and using it is painfull sometimes.
 
No worries. I have 8 ram slots in my board. If I run 64-bit windows I can stick 8G in with cheap modules.
 
Robstar said:
No worries. I have 8 ram slots in my board. If I run 64-bit windows I can stick 8G in with cheap modules.
Click to expand...

Well the machine I am refering to is a machine at work. It's only got four ram slots, but it has 4GB in 2 x2048GB modules.
 
I use my dual 2.4Ghz box at work to run multiple VMs... works fine. My home box, a dual Opteron 246, also does many VMs.

And they perform well.... BUT if you want the best and if the machine is dedicated to hosting a plethora of VMs, you might want to export VMware ESX server (it's its own OS written in assembler).

We have ESX Server on an 8way Opteron (4 875's) with 16G and 6 gigabit NICs. Now that's a VMware server.
 
I believe ESX version 3 (coming out in the near future) will have support for dual core processors (being able to assign a physical processer for each VM). I recently was in a VMware class where they stated that ESX 2.5 didn't have official support for dual core.
 
Rocco123 said:
I believe ESX version 3 (coming out in the near future) will have support for dual core processors (being able to assign a physical processer for each VM). I recently was in a VMware class where they stated that ESX 2.5 didn't have official support for dual core.
Click to expand...

That would be a welcome feature.
 
As far as ESX 3 is concerned, why is a dual core processor any different than a single core processor in its own socket? What did they need to do to support dual core over multiple single-core processors?
 
mikeblas said:
As far as ESX 3 is concerned, why is a dual core processor any different than a single core processor in its own socket? What did they need to do to support dual core over multiple single-core processors?
Click to expand...

On that I am not sure. That doesn't make a lot of sense. That technology is pretty much seamless for the most part.
 
2.5.2 sees all 8 cores. I think perhaps they mean their Virtual SMP add on might allow you to configure VMs with dual core processors perhaps? Right now you can configure a multi-cpu VM guest, but doesn't really specify dual core.
 
Just complete speculation, but maybe it handles CPU affinity a little better. Although it still doesn't answer the reason why you would be able to do dual or quad CPU. I am sure they need to make optimizations to the code. Maybe can someone do some DB benchies to see if this is the case between the two different releases? Maybe something for the fine ppl of [H] can arrange a comparison as this would be a good topic that many IT bean counters would look at.
 
if you are going to run dedicated servers for counterstrike just run them in the host operating system not a vm. assign a different port per server needed and you're away and running and you'll get petter performance and disk i/o etc..

bf1942 would nned the vm and winxp but agin run them under one guets vm and assign more ports to each new instance. the less vm's you have running the less overhead overall on the system and the higher the overall performance.

say you're running 2 counterstrike servers and 2 bf1942 servers.
run the host os under cpu 0 and the counterstrike servers set the affinities to cpu 1 and 2.
run the bf 1942 servers all under winxp under as a guest on cpu 3.

most performance that way and you can tune the performance more for ram to bf1942 vs. counterstrike as needed.
 
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