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
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.
- These seem to cover the main uses of our servers:
- CPU/RAM: Compile something big, and compare nonvirtual, virtual file, and virtual disk timings.
- Network: Use ttcp compare nonvirtual, virtual file, and virtual disk transfer rates.
- Hard Disk: Use hdparm
- 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 ‡ | compilation 2 †† |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real | 71788.49 KB/s | 90 MB/s | 5070 MB/s | 4m | 4m |
| TestFile | 32901.71 KB/s | 37 MB/s | 2677 MB/s | 11m | 9m |
| TestDisk | 31386.37 KB/s | 37 MB/s | 6091 MB/s | 11m | 11m |
† - From machine to blackbody over UNH.
‡ - Compilation of linux-2.6.24.3, default make menuconfig with make bzImage, "real" time
†† - Same as above, but with available RAM at the maximum recommended allotment.
Unixbench results
I've posted the full results because the 0 on Execl Throughput seems to give a final score of zero (it mentions a buffer overrun and segfaults, so that's probably why).
| Test | Real | TestFile | TestDisk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arithmetic Test (type = double) | 314.1 | 194.3 | 113.8 |
| Dhrystone 2 using register variables | 1408.6 | 874.0 | 787.2 |
| Execl Throughput | 0.0 | 44.5 | 46.4 |
| File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks | 1211.4 | 814.8 | 750.2 |
| File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks | 906.0 | 622.9 | 584.2 |
| File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks | 1626.3 | 988.8 | 967.1 |
| Pipe Throughput | 805.7 | 517.8 | 506.8 |
| Process Creation | 1175.1 | 11.4 | 11.7 |
| Shell Scripts (8 Concurrent) | 3875.0 | 169.5 | 167.7 |
| System Call Overhead | 561.4 | 332.8 | 322.7 |
| Final Score | 0.0 | 257.1 | 237.4 |
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.
