Re: [Nolug] XP over 7 on VirtualBox

From: Jimmy Hess <mysidia_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2011 11:35:38 -0500
Message-ID: <CAAAwwbUuckEJTmFATX+tKYHa9sG2nA5ap5n_afBpnbE4L5z7TQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 9:34 AM, B. Estrade <estrabd@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 06:30:00AM -0500, Clint Billedeaux wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 7:54 PM, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> wrote:

> Think about this; if you have a 4 core machine, you shouldn't run more
> than 3 images if you expect to have "good performance"; further more,

"Good performance" in a set of metrics you care about also depends on
the application.
If you measure performance in "I expect to boot a VM at any time, have
it boot to a XP
desktop in 30 seconds, double click on such and such icon, open MS
Office within 10 seconds,
and have cnn.com open up within 2 seconds of double clicking "; then
you are more
stringent than if you defined good performance "A VM can take 10
minutes to boot,
and I expect to be able to get to a web page within 5 minutes"

If you are virtualizing to aggregate servers onto as little metal as
possible, then 3:4,
that is 3 virtual CPU threads to 4 physical cores, is really a
very low consolidation ratio.
4:1, 8:1, and 16:1, are good. For most common server workloads,
CPU is easy to
overcommit, and memory is often a bottleneck.

For VMs running on Linux, I think you can achieve at least 2:1 or 4:1
for many workloads,
without a performance issue -- the more you want to overcommit, the
more planning you need.
To exceed 2:1, you will want some CPU features, hardware assist to
offload certain aspects of your
virtual machine monitor to hardware, specifically VT, VT-x,
RVI/VT-d, NIC functionality,
and the NX/XD security feature.

None of that does any good, however, unless your BIOS and motherboard
chipset support
the CPU feature, has it enabled, and your virtual machine software
also supports it.
Often CPU/motherboard manufacturers will "segment" their market, and
artificially cripple their
CPU by disabling the "performance accelerating feature" for desktop models.

ECC memory is also something to look for on many VMs to a single
workstation; the problem
with non-ECC memory, is if you have it, and it goes bad, you are more
likely to have critical issues
in the vein of data corruption, as over time... different VMs and
different parts of VMs memory areas
live on the "bad chip", random unexplainable blue screening and
filesystem corruption are more
likely than they would be in the "single host" situation, where
likely only applications would be
effected.

Obviously, if you are running your VMs on top of Linux instead of a
bare metal hypervisor,
the general purpose OS is not designed to schedule the VMX processes
efficiently, and
the memory manager is not really taylored to make the right decisions
about how to allocate
memory for the workload. You are also layering two levels of resource
management on top
of each other, which creates overhead and causes poorer performance.

> memory to map more than 1:1 to VM memory, you don't have unfettered
> access to this memory on the VMs because you are actually contributing
> to a great amount of memory contention on the host OS.

If your OS is lightweight; and your VM memory usage is less than the
available memory,
the situation you have isn't contention with applications _amount of
available memory_.
You might have memory _access contention_, but again that's usually
not an issue,
depending on how much memory and how many VMs you are actually using.

Although the OS may see a large amount of memory and wish to use it
for filesystem cache.
What's clear though... is the memory overcommit in Linux is no good
for VM workloads.
If you do overcommit, swapping will not be intelligent, and will
totally compromise the performance
of the system.

I would say make sure you when using Linux to host VMs, have at least
20% more physical
memory than you assign to VMs (if more than 2 or 3 VMs, ECC memory,
of course, on a supporting MB).

Advanced memory overcommit techniques, for the most part, are only
meaningful on bare metal.
Possible exception of "Kernel samepage", but really, the feature lacks maturity.

> just taking advantage of the locality of data. It doesn't address
> memory paging issues brought in by heavy memory use of multiple
> processes; it also doesn't address the bottle necks at the networking
> or I/O level.

If your server has some decent NICs, the primary networking concern
with typical network workloads would be packets per second.
Remember, in essence you need to interrupt 2 extra CPU cores every
time a packet is received or sent just to copy the data, instead of 0
CPU cores on a physical host where data is DMA'd, and that's in a
bare metal hypervisor situation (without SRIOV) -- if you are
utilizing NAT mode networking or routing on your VM host, it's worse.

For local storage I/O you should be concerned with how many IOPs and
how much bandwidth your total VM workload requires, your storage
system capabilities will also depend on how random/distributed across
VMs your IO workload is, and how well distributed the requests are
between reads and writes.

Your workstation's amount of controller cache and IO rate capacity are
the major factors, the physical constraints of your controller are
not exceeded by having multiple workloads; sizing the IO subsystem for
a workstation running 20VMs is similar to sizing the IO subsystem of
a database server.

> even use a host OS because it just gets in the way. You need something
> like Xen or hypervisor that serves as a very basic layer without

Something like XenClient with a standalone install, if they have that
available still.
For pure server workloads, ESXi or XenServer :)

--
-JH
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Received on 10/23/11

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