henry ritzlmayr wrote: > Am Mittwoch, den 11.06.2008, 10:06 -0700 schrieb MHR: > >> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 8:36 AM, Ruslan Sivak <russ at vshift.com> wrote: >> >>> I guess it has something to do with the ballooning driver for Dom0. It >>> looks like I just tried to allocation too much memory to DomU and the box >>> went down hard. I think there's a setting in xen to the min amount of >>> memory to go down to, but I'm not sure why Dom0 is using 600mb of RAM. Is >>> there a mini installation of CentOS that I can do that would use less RAM? >>> I've already unchecked all the boxes when installing CentOS. I would like >>> Dom0 to be as small as possible, both due to RAM usage and from a security >>> perspective. >>> >> I've not familiarized myself with xen yet, but have you considered >> VMware Server? I haven't had any serious problems with it, and none >> at all since v1.0.5 came out (1.0.6 is the current one). Works >> nicely, stays within its memory allocation, and top et al work as >> you'd expect them to. >> >> HTH >> >> mhr >> > > 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? > > For example: > > dd if=/dev/md5 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1000 on bare metal gave 272 MB/s > same within VMware gave only 47,9 MB/s > > I know that dd is not a benchmark - but for measuring sequential reads > within a system its fair enough for me. > > Henry > > This was another reason that I went with Xen, although my testing method at the time was flawed. I've been using hdtune to measure windows performance, but it was giving me 70mb/s across the board. I'm using IOmeter now and I will try to reinstall VMWare to see what the performance difference is. Russ