Aaron Mulder on 19 Oct 2006 18:21:51 -0000 |
We use VMware Server on a SuSE 10 host and it works quite well. I can come up with a few issues, but they're not showstoppers: - If you ssh to the machine over the Internet and the run the full VMware+Guest OS GUI via X forwarding, it's horribly slow. There is a remote admin tool that may be better, and connections on the same LAN are fine (though Mac clients need to ssh -Y). - The guest OS seems a bit more vulnerable to unexpected power outages than a native OS -- I assume because data can be "in cache" both in the host and guest OS's. (One Windows guest refused to boot after such a problem.) We ended up with a script that suspends, copies, and resumes each VM each night. - With a number of VMs running (including 2 running databases), the disk access seems to be a limiting factor (and a guest doesn't get the same disk performance as it would from a native install on the same hardware). I would be wary of putting a production or high-load DB in a VM. - For Opteron machines, you may or may not be able to run 64-bit Guest VMs depending on the chip revision. No idea how it works for Intel. You can run a 64-bit host in any case and we haven't had trouble using more than 4 GB total across all the guests. - Note that every time your kernel changes (e.g. due to a kernel security update) on either the host or the guest, you'll have to run a script on that OS to rebuild various VMware modules. I've noticed that VMware Server now lets you select 1 or 2 virtual CPUs for each VM, but I haven't tried setting any guests to 2 yet. Thanks, Aaron On 10/19/06, Mark Baker <mrkbkr@gmail.com> wrote:
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