Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2007 20:11:16 -0400 From: "Maxim Khitrov" <mkhitrov@gmail.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Virtualization of FreeBSD Message-ID: <26ddd1750706061711t660afba9h737735b9e1805c65@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <46674717.6020105@calarts.edu> References: <46674717.6020105@calarts.edu>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On 6/6/07, Sean Murphy <smurphy@calarts.edu> wrote: > Is anyone running virtualization of FreeBSD servers on VMware or other > virtualization software? What experiences have you had, good or bad? At home I run have several FreeBSD installs running on Windows 2003 VMWare Server. The only reason I'm doing this is because FreeBSD doesn't support my raid controller, so I'm stuck with windows. Overall it works fine. However, you do have terrible disk (and to a lesser extent network) performance. I use these installs mostly for developing and testing software, so it's not a big deal for me. Here are a few tips for getting the most out of a FreeBSD server on VMWare (this is for Windows only): - If you have enough memory, add prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100" and prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "TRUE" to VMWare config.ini (App Data under All Users). That will keep all the VM memory in ram instead of swapping it to the disk. The rest of the settings go into your FreeBSD.vmx file. - Disable named memory file: mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE" - Disable page sharing: sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE" - Disable memory trimming: MemTrimRate = "0" - Be sure to use Intel gigabit network adapter: ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000" In previous versions of VMWare Server you had to configure your kern.hz sysctl to be 100. Otherwise your clock would run very slow. I think they fixed it in the latest version, but just keep that in mind. Disk performance is quite bad. For example, doing a full extract of the ports tree takes my server around 16 minutes. On my old laptop with a crappy hard drive it takes only 8 or so minutes. So that's something to keep in mind, you're not going to be able to use VMs as a file server. For most other uses it works fine. - Max
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?26ddd1750706061711t660afba9h737735b9e1805c65>