VMWare Progress

• Installed two of the 750GB drives into new benfranklin. Need to come up with a partition layout. Maybe just one system per disk (one of which will be virtualized)? I think this is good enough for testing, so that's what I'll do.
• RHEL5 is installed, as well as the latest version of vmware server. The current (default) configuration seems to be invalid, asking to re-configure via /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl. Reconfiguring with the defaults makes no difference. It says it needs inted/xinetd, but neither is installed. Yum won't work without RHN, so we've gotta set that up. I'm just going to unetitle tomato; we seem to have agreed that that machine's a lost cause. (New Benfranklin). I installed the prerequisites and now it's asking for the 20-character serial number. I got 15 of them from VMWare; the link is in the text above the big shiny "Download" button. I put them in a text file in my home directory. Entered the serial number, and vmware runs.

• Making a machine on a virtual disk is easy, just follow the default settings for the most part. The virtual disks are split into 2GB files on the real disk, so disk-intensive activities might take a noticeable hit.
• Making a machine on a partition/real disk requires doing a "custom" setup.
• Choose NAT for networking so we don't have to mess with getting new IPs, etc. To use this, just select DHCP for the VM's OS.
• It seems like vmware needs to be reconfigured whenever a new kernel is installed. Not too big of a deal, but something to keep in mind.

VMWare Server

• Runs on any standard x86 hardware
• Supports 64-bit guest operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Solaris
• Supports two-processor Virtual SMP, enabling a single virtual machine to span multiple physical processors ("experimental")
• Runs on a wider variety of Linux and Windows host and guest operating systems than any server virtualization product on the market
• Captures entire state of a virtual machine and rolls back at any time with the click of a single button
• Installs like an application, with quick and easy, wizard-driven installation
• Quick and easy, wizard-driven virtual machine creation
• Supports Intel Virtualization Technology
• Protects investment with an easy upgrade path to VMware Infrastructure

Other docs

Tests

I've set up two virtual machines on new benfranklin: One is on a virtual disk on the "real" machine's hard drive (named "TestFile"), and one is on it's own hard drive (named "TestDrive"). Otherwise, they're set up with the same stats: 1024MB RAM, NAT ethernet, 2 processors. Root access is the usual scheme.

• Other than being a little slow to read from CD, the installation of RHEL5 to TestFile seems as snappy as a physical installation. Boots/reboots can be very sluggish, though.
• Here are two tests that I have in mind. They seem to cover the main uses of our servers:

1. CPU/RAM test: Compile something big, like X, and compare nonvirtual, virtual file, and virtual disk timings.
2. Network test: Use ttcp compare nonvirtual, virtual file, and virtual disk transfer rates.
3. This page should be helpful: [1]. Now we won't have to write any custom tests. In that case, ttcp seems like the simplest for network tests (had to set up a the RPMforge repo (a-la pepper's) to get yum to install it), and maybe one of those NASA ones to test computing performance.

Results

These are averages from several runs.

Machine	ttcp †	hdparm -t	hdparm -T	compilation	NASA?
Real	71788.49 KB/s	90 MB/s	5070 MB/s	-	-
TestFile	32901.71 KB/s	37 MB/s	2677 MB/s	-	-
TestDisk	31386.37 KB/s	37 MB/s	6091 MB/s	-	-

† - From machine to blackbody over UNH.

VMWare Converter

To turn a physical machine into a virtual one, use Converter, on Windows. We're slightly screwed for this part.

NOTE: Experimental support only is available for Linux-based physical to virtual machine conversions using the Vmware Converter BootCD (cold cloning) if the source physical machine has SCSI disks.

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/faqs.html