On Mon, 2007-10-15 at 13:32 +0200, Kai Schaetzl wrote:
I'm wondering what others who have already used the Xen kernel for DomUs and the (free) VMWare Server can say about the comparison in actual day-to-day operation. I've only started playing with Xen on CentOS 5 and I've been running VMWare Server only on Win2k3 servers so far, so I'm missing direct comparibility.
It depends on what you want to run as a domU. Paravirtualization is very fast (e.g. for running domU CentOS 4/5 kernels). On the other hand, some devices are very slow if you use Xen HVM for running systems that do not have a kernel that functions as a Xen domU. As long as we don't have paravirtualized network/display drivers for those systems, network/graphic performance will not be very good.
So, what do you plan to run as a virtual machine?
I found that when I close the VM console that drops to 2-3%, so that python process is obviously related to the VM console. The interesting thing is that when I then reopen the console from the VM manager it keeps going at about 3% and doesn't go up to the earlier 9%. But it still zigzags between 3 and 11% then. All the figures have been taken from the VM manager. The %us count in top seems to stay at 3% all the time.
Did you try to connect to the VM virtual framebuffer with vncviewer, rather than virt-manager? What loads do you get then?
I wonder if this problem might happen because I use the option of not allocating all space in the filesystem file right-away. I also wonder if performance might be better if it wouldn't need to grow.
I have never seen this problem on production machines. But I don't use virt-manager, so I am not sure at what point it rewrites the domain configuration files after the installation.
-- Daniel