Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Mini Gentoo in VMWare

[Trenton Adams]

Your slowness could be due to not telling vmware to allocate all memory into physical memory, and not using a full sized disk image.  It seems like vmware accesses the blocks directly, when you pre-allocate.  And if the image gets fragmented, vmware warns you about it, so that you can ask it to defragment it.  But, if you're using a resizable image, then you may see some slowness.

I bench marked the disk running gentoo linux on a Dell D820 notebook, in native mode.  I copied that same gentoo over to a VM, and ran into in windows on the same D820 Notebook, and got slightly better performance results, by about 2-5 M/sec.  I used "bonnie++ -c 5 -s 4096 -r 768 -u someone".  I haven't tried it on a dynamically re-sizable disk.  These results indicate to me that VMware is using direct block access, and bypassing the file system.  Either that, or simply keeping it un-fragmented makes a big difference.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  !
   

As far as compiling slower, I've found there is a very MINOR difference between a real machine, and a VM.

On 11/7/06, Daevid Vincent <daevid@××××××.com> wrote:
> I use a Gentoo VM for a lot of LAMP dev work, and I can tell you it's kind
> of painful to upgrade packages with all the compiling. VMWare is slower than
> normal to compile, mostly due to disk I/O. Since each HD is a big-ass file.
>
> A few optimizations I might suggest:
>
> Partition a dedicated physical hard drive into chunks and use VMWare's "raw"
> disk so you have real hardware/hard disks. I'd suggest a very fast SCSI
> drive for the best performance since you're running several VMs.
>
> Also, look into the VMWare server version which uses the raw iron a bit
> better as it's dedicated to running many VMs.
>
> I find that more RAM on VMWare has a point of deminishing returns. I have a
> VM that I dedicate 512MB of my 2GBs and honestly it feels slower than when I
> give it 128-256MB only. It may be a WinXP thing that it's not efficiently
> using the RAM right or something.
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Trenton Adams [mailto:trenton.d.adams@×××××.com]
> > Sent: Sunday, November 05, 2006 9:19 PM
> > To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
> > Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Mini Gentoo in VMWare
> >
> > Yes, VMWare is fit for the task, simply because I would be using it on
> > a windows machine.  Unless there is something better for a windows
> > machine?
> >
> > Thanks for the hints.
> >
> > On 11/3/06, Harm Geerts <harmgeerts@××××.nl> wrote:
> > > On Friday 03 November 2006 06:43, Trenton Adams wrote:
> > > > Hi Guys,
> > > >
> > > > Has anyone here played with minimalizing everything for
> > use in vmware?
> > > >
> > > > Basically what I want to do is create a series of VERY
> > tiny VMs that
> > > > are all independent of each other, which provide one service.  For
> > > > instance, I might put apache on one VM, and tomcat on
> > another, and so
> > > > on.  Obviously, I would want their memory usage to be absolutely
> > > > minimized, seeing that I would like to run them all on
> > one computer.
> > > > I would probably provide them 64M-128M of RAM each, for
> > their specific
> > > > service.  Perhaps a little more if really required.
> > > >
> > > > Is there really anything that I should worry about?
> > Perhaps I should
> > > > just DO IT?
> > >
> > > Nick[1] made a post about minimizing Gentoo a while back.
> > > But that topic was mainly about the disk usage.
> > > I suppose you would benefit from a system that uses the -Os
> > flag to create
> > > small binairies.
> > >
> > > But do you think vmware is fit for such a task?
> > > vmware is a big strain on resources itself.
> > > You might want to have a look at xen[2] instead.
> > >
> > > [1]
> > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/160899/focus=160903
> > > [2] http://www.xensource.com/xen/xen/index.html
> > > --
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> > >
> > >
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> >
> >
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