[CentOS-virt] Windows HVM VMs - speed needed...

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 3:33 PM, Stephen <sdw2 at shineonline.co.nz> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I was hoping to run a Windows 2003 server in production on Centos 5.2
> however the performance isn't very good.
>
> The host is Centos 5.2 64 bit. I did some file transfers and I'm seeing
> about 12Mb/s on a Windows 2003 VM and about 8Mb/s on a Windows 2003 32 bit
> VM. Numbers are measured using the builtin Windows 2003 server networking
> monitor (Press Ctrl Alt Del in Windows and go to the Windows tab).
>
> The server is an IBM xServe about a year old and the VMs are running in LVM
> partitions. Switches are Cisco Gigabit. So the hardware for server
> performance and network performance are not a limiting factor - I understand
> that the results I'm seeing are typical without running paravirtualized
> drivers in Windows.
>
> Just wanted to ask what the options are to get things going faster. I
> believe the choices are:-
> - Pay the dollars for a RedHat subscription which includes paravitualized
> drives for Windows
>  - Install the LGPL PV drivers (don't want to do this, these are production
> machines and even up to a few months ago I'm seeing reports of VM corruption
> in the list. It would appear that the LGPL PV drivers are not at production
> standard yet)
>  - Pay for an alternative Xen distribution, such as Xen's commercial
> product.
>
> Can someone confirm, have I covered all the bases?
>

I have heard of one other option:

Halsign TurboGate Tools
http://www.halsign.com/

I haven't tried them personally, but I have seen them announced on the
Xen mailing lists.

Todd

-- 
Todd Deshane
http://todddeshane.net
check out our book: http://runningxen.com