nate wrote:
MHR wrote:
On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 10:31 AM, henry ritzlmayr centos@rc0.at wrote:
I evaluated VMware Server myself (v1.0.3) and at that time, Disk I/O was pretty bad within a virtual machine. The only solution I found was XEN with paravirtualization. Has there been any progress on that with later releases?
I couldn't say - I mainly use VMWare so I can run the two or three Window$ applications I can't get (or can't find for a good price) on Linux. Performance is not really an issue, and most of the disk access I do is via samba to my host disks. I avoid using the virtual disks as much as possible.
I came across this a couple days ago
http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/
May 22, 2008 100,000 I/O Operations Per Second, One ESX Host
Maxing out 500 15k RPM spindles with a single host. I didn't think that was even possible. Granted this is ESX and not VMware server (previously known as GSX), but ESX is pretty cheap these days, the foundation version gets you a ton of stuff minus hot migrations for $999(per 2 proc) (used to be about $3750). I think the enterprise edition (~$5k per 2 proc) is overkill for most uses.
nate
If I was going to pay for something, I would probably get XenServer. I really liked the management utility, and I think the performance was OK, I might need to test the performance again. It's also only $1k or so for the standard edition (and have a free express edition, which only supports 4GB of ram).
Russ