[sllug-members]: VMWare machines on Linux

[Nathan Lane [yho]]

Thank you James,

this whole thread has been very helpful, and these comments you just gave here help me out a lot.  Unfortunately I'm tied down to very old hardware - P 3 750 - and I'm not sure how much memory I can get on there - I know my p3 450 only take up to 512 MB for RAM.  My hard disk space is severely limited right now also, which means I'll have to wait before I can do this.

I recently read something about User Mode Linux and wonder what the difference between that and a VMWare virtual machine might be.  To me they sound the same, and since I already know VMWare, I'll stick with it I think.  Much simpler that way I'm sure.

Thanks,

Nathan

James Knowles <jamesk at ifm-services.com> wrote: 
> My question is: Has anybody had experience running a Windows VM in
> Linux on an IDE based system?  How well does it run?  Is VMWare a
> resource hog when it's not their server?

Nathan,

As far as SCSI/IDE, I have seen no noticeable difference running any
VMware product on SCSI hardware versus [S]ATA. Just make sure you are
smart with your data. Mirror your drives, and create logical volumes on
the RAID devices. Put your virtual machines in those logical volumes.
That should go without saying regardless of SCSI or ATA.

I've been using VMware in various capacities since they first came out
with their Linux version many moons ago. I'm pretty familiar with what
factors affect performance.

#1 factor: RAM. Lots of it. You want enough for the VMs as well as a
generous amount that Linux can use for disk caching. Set the VMware
software to keep the entire VM in memory. If you set it to allow the VM
going to swap, VM performance can tank.

IMHO Linux is the ideal OS for running VMware. The disk caching strategy
is especially helpful. I consistently see much better performance from
VMs running on Linux than Windows.

If you can do dual-CPUs, that will make the VMs silky smooth. If not, it
still works well. If you want to throw several VMs on a machine, this
will really help.

I currently have an old dual Athlon machine running eight VMs. Both CPUs
are about 40% busy all the time when the machines are idle, but it
doesn't seem to phase the Linux box. I can still run both native Linux
software as well as do development work within the virtual environment
without seeing any real impact.

Anyhow, I hope this helps some.

James

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