Virtualization - Advice Needed

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Uber geeks of Brell:

I need some help deciding on the best VM software to use. Here's the background:

Background

I do my software development strictly with virtual machines. It's a great way to do things, especially since I have a disdain for hardware. If my computer blows up then I can up and running with my "development machines" on pretty much any computer in existence in literally a matter of minutes.

Problem

Now I'm running all the latest shit like Windows 7 Ultimate, VS 2010 professional, SQL Server 2008 R2 and so forth on my virtual machines, and they've just been getting slower and slower. And my projects have been getting bigger and bigger, to where some of them take 10 minutes to compile and it's starting to remind me of the 1990's.

Currently I have an Intel Q6600 (?) quad core with 6 gigs of RAM (mobo doesn't like 4th stick) and a few terabytes of "green" (i.e. low RPM) disk space. Now I have all the parts for a new Phenom II 6 core machine with 8 gigs of RAM on its way, and I know that will speed things up, but I've about had it with Microsoft Virtual PC. So I'm taking this opportunity to upgrade my VM software too.

I currently have about a dozen virtual machines covering pretty much every operating system and development environment I'd be likely to need. Usually I only have 1 or 2 running at a time.

Advice Needed

A couple people have told me about some freeware called "virtual box" or something, and I know VM ware is a strong product. I want to be frugal with the company's money, but I also want better performance from my virtualization.

So, any advice? I know faster hardware is good but do I need the 16 gigs or maybe a 10k RPM Raptor or SSD or something? Should I move to Virtual Box? Will that give me better performance than Virtual PC? Anyone working in a similar environment? I may have to go back to being a pool boy in So. Cal. before I'm going to waste my life away waiting 10 minutes for my projects to compile. I'm already working 20 hour days as it is.

Thanks in advance guys!

[Bahd Zoolander]

As far as I know, you should be able to use your Virtual PC images in both VMWare player (which is free) and Virtual Box. I'd guess the speed is going to be about the same in all of them and you just need to decide which features are important.

I wish I had 10 minute compiles. Even with Incredibuild and a really beefy build machine some take half an hour or more.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Hmph, well we'll see what the new hardware does. Supposedly my Q6600 wasn't a "true quad core" and the memory and higher clock speed and more cores (3.3 X 6 versus 2.4 X 4) will be much faster so maybe that will do it.

I didn't know the VMWare player is free. I might try that next. MS VPC can't run a 64 bit VM. Can any of the others?

Here's my beefy work machine I ordered today.I will probably do the "token overclock" to 3.7 and this should hopefully kick fucking ass. I'm still considering downgrading to VS 2008 because it seems much faster. Both will target framework 3.0 just fine so there's no really disadvantage other than VS 2010 is a little snazzier.

CPU

AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition Thuban 3.3GHz, 3.7GHz Turbo 6 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Six-Core Desktop Processor
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819103913

RAM

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820231314

Main Board

GIGABYTE GA-890GPA-UD3H AM3 AMD 890GX HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813128435

[Ddrak]

I'm a fan of VMWare personally. You can download a trial of VMWare Workstation for 15 days if you want to play with it, but the performance is pretty decent. Like any system, defragging the virtual drives helps out with compiles a fair bit (an option in the VMWare tools inside the VM).

Yes, VMWare supports 64 bit VMs as long as your host OS is 64 bit. Make sure to tinker with the memory settings to get the best perf out of VMWare also.

I seriously doubt Virtual Box will give anywhere near VPC or VMWare performance.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Does the free VM ware player support 64 bit VMs?

[Ddrak]

Yes, but you'll want VMWare Workstation anyway for its snapshot trees. Player is a little bit too limiting (in my opinion).

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Well my first experience with WMWare player didn't go that well, but I was mostly farting around, so we'll see once it's game day. And the one VM I did get working wanted me to reactivate Windows which I'm not sure I wanted to do just yet.

Ugh, none of my power supplies had that new 6+2 PCI-E power connector on it so more of the boss's money and I have to wait another couple days to play with my new toy since it won't even POST without that connector

This thing has a decent (and power hungry) integrated video, HD4290 or something. I'm hoping it will pay Rift decently so I can give the old quad core to the wife as-is. My friend the hardware guru says I made a bad choice going with the Gigabyte board versus the Asus but this thing looks badass, and durable like I could drive over it with my truck. So hopefully another good system with a Gigabyte motherboard and G.Skill RAM. Just with an AMD chip.

I've heard good things about the Phenom II so man I'm just chomping at the bit waiting to see how my VMs will run!

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Another quick question: What is the performance of a 64 bit VM like compared to a 32 bit VM? Does it make better use of RAM / CPU cores?

I'm pretty much set on starting with VMWare player with fresh, new VMs and then moving to the workstation version if I'm happy with player. I might as well do fresh VMs if it's going to burn up an activation, eh?

[Mukik]

vmware player is going to be slower than workstation. I had a person sitting to my right who bled vmware in this class I attended over vsphere. 32 vs 64 for what youre using is going to boil down to allowing you to run a 64 bit os vs a 32 bit os. When you get into a vcenter or vsx host for virtualisation, thats where the fun begins, vmotion, applicaition pools..ha, blah blah blah.

Whats your underlying operating system? Mines ubuntu 10.10 for the moment

Another thing is, how iis your partitioning schemes for the virtualised systems? vms fragment the hell out of your filesystem (being a bunch of files themselves) and you might be running into fragmentation/ io issues. I usually run vms on one of three partitions . one for linux, one for windows and one for openfilers

so for linux its /vms and then I have mountpoints of linux windows and filers each of them are either an ext3 partition on centos 5 or ext4 on ubuntu. I try not to use lvm anymore either
I did migrate my vms from a windows seven host to linux so its not impossible to do that either.
if this was a windows box I would suggest a seperate drive at least for the vms themselves if not one per box, especially for your sql system perhaps you should run a seperate drive just for the database itself along with a partition for a system you dont use as much (balance out the io a bit perhaps)
sorry my mind is fragmented a bit, been a long day at work doing linux stuff ( I can breathe I no longer work / slave for big blue!! yay!) by all means shoot another message or I will check in after work to see what you have or would like me to stress test while I set up my vcp lab to possibly help?

[Freecare Spiritwise]

My host OS is Windows 7, though I have thought about getting my feet wet and running trying Linux as my host strictly for performance and have my "home computer" be just another VM.

I'm pretty much a die hard Windows Developer and have been for the last 20 years, so no Linux at all ... yet. And some day might as well because ... well because I can !

My interest in 64 bit guest OSs would just be performance. My host OS needs to be 64 bit to see all my RAM and so forth, but for my dev machines whatever is faster.

Hmmm you've given me a couple things to think about. I appreciate the input, and I'll probably have more questions as I dial in my new rig and environment. I might just start with an evaluation version of vmware workstation instead of player.

Sure glad I paid (ok, boss did) extra for rush processing and next day delivery. They were in such a rush to deliver it that they lost it for a day, so the new work machine should live tomorrow!

[Ddrak]

Start with an eval of workstation. You can downgrade to player if you need from there.

I don't notice any difference between 64 and 32 bit guests on VMWare (win7-x64 host). 32 probably uses marginally less memory? Your VMs are 100% portable between Linux, Mac and Windows host OSes. In fact, you can port from ESXi backward and forward to VMWare Workstation if you want as well (sftp the files off and load them up in workstation).

Get familiar with powering down and taking snapshots regularly (you don't have to power down, but it saves a bunch of disk space to not have RAM images laying around).

Dunno what else to say. Have fun.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Any other thoughts on VM I/O performance? I'll look into defragmenation but I thought Windows did that automatically now.

Thoughts about putting VMs on an SSD or high RPM drives? Right now I'm running low RPM (5400 RPM) "green" drives and I have been considering something like a 10,000 RPM Raptor since I'm not sure that an SSD would be the best fit. I think my green drives are slowing me down even though they give me shitloads of capacity dirt cheap.

I'm not sure I need regular snapshots though because I like to keep a lightweight development environment - basically visual studio and sql server. A few other tools and utilities but not many. A few hours to setup a new build machine and once it's all patched and I make a copy of it, I can pull up the copy of the VM, hit the "update project" button in Ankh and be productive in minutes.

[Ddrak]

Any other thoughts on VM I/O performance? I'll look into defragmenation but I thought Windows did that automatically now.

Thoughts about putting VMs on an SSD or high RPM drives? Right now I'm running low RPM (5400 RPM) "green" drives and I have been considering something like a 10,000 RPM Raptor since I'm not sure that an SSD would be the best fit. I think my green drives are slowing me down even though they give me shitloads of capacity dirt cheap.

I'm not sure I need regular snapshots though because I like to keep a lightweight development environment - basically visual studio and sql server. A few other tools and utilities but not many. A few hours to setup a new build machine and once it's all patched and I make a copy of it, I can pull up the copy of the VM, hit the "update project" button in Ankh and be productive in minutes.

Windows doesn't do that great a job at defragging. There's a few decent free alternatives out there at the moment to keep the drive defragged, and you also have to consider the internal fragmentation of the virtual disk file (the file stores blocks in a different order to what it reports to the guest OS) so you have to actually defrag from VMWare Tools inside the guest as well to keep everything running as fast as possible.

I'm running Intellipower drives too and not been that bothered by the performance. We've also benchmarked the latest ESXi at above 90% of native IO performance on our build clusters so I wouldn't get too upset. Just make sure you're giving the VM enough memory and it all goes well in my experience.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Well I upgraded the cpu/ram/mobo, gave the video card to the wife to use the HD4290 onboard video and installed the same model hard drive (Samsung F1 1TB) as my other machine. So far I'm unimpressed. It's nice having a 6 core 3.5 GHz slighly overclocked barnburner with 8 gigs of RAM, but the video performance makes it overall a bit slower than my last machine.

A few thoughts so far:

- The disk is more of a bottleneck than I thought. The 6 cores are more I/O starved than the 4 were. A 600 GB Raptor is one of my next upgrades.

- I didn't realize that video performance has any impact on a development VM, but it does. I actually get a little lag typing/scrolling in Visual Studio now where I didn't before. WTF, this HD 4290 was supposed to be a video upgrade from the cheap 9600 GSO card in my other machine.

- VMWare workstation is very nice, has a great feature set but seems a little slower than MS Virtual PC, so I'm sticking with what I have for now. My friend is still harping on about Virtual Box so I'll probably give that a quick try. I have windows keys to burn muwahahaha.

So I tried to save the boss some money and shot myself in the foot by falling short on I/O and video. But having said that, I'm thrilled with this new Phenom II chip. I clocked it back to stock because honestly this thing sits idle most of the time so WTF do I need to squeeze out a few clock cycles for when it's waiting on the disk.

Still haven't compiled my big projects yet, but I'm predicting about a 10% boost, which I'll take. Overall my VMs seem only a little faster.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

UPDATE:

It turns out the shared video memory was causing me grief. The integrated video has 128 M of side port memory and when I set it to use that only I not only got 500M of my memory back, but the lag in my VMs went way /cheer. Glad I caught this in one of the reviews. And the video benchmarks stayed the same.

If you buy high performance electronics, always read all the reviews!

Some day I'll do my gaming in VMs too, but I don't think I'm at that point hardware-wise lol.

[Ddrak]

Games are weird in VMs because the timing gets all messed up.

Dd

[Mukik]

Another think you can try on the hypervisor side , presuming you havent dedicated everthing so far and handed the wife the keys to your old box are some free hypervisors that are available to you. (these would go in place of windows or linux..etc

Microsoft hyper -v
http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server ... o-get.aspx


vmware esxi free
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere- ... rview.html

I am not versed on the ms side, but esxi is fairly slim compared to its customized redhat companion, and all you have to do is go to the console, set up your preferrences , and afterwards use the vclient to administrate your "host".

native hypervisors leave a smaller footprint and may or may not help your overhead / performace issues as well

[Freecare Spiritwise]

I thought about doing it that way, Mukik, but sometimes I might have a family member or friend hop on there and I think something like that would blow their minds lol.

So I spent a day last week tweaking the BIOS settings and I spent tonight setting up my x64 VMware machine and running it side with its 32 bit Virtual PC counterpart. Oh, man what a difference in performance. I'm sure it has something to do with running the 64 bit version of visual studio 2010 but holy shit the 64 bit version is fast. I keep forgetting to give the VM 4 gigs of RAM (or more) and that will probably make it scream even more.

Just with 2 gigs of RAM I gave the VM this thing this thing has flown through everything it's done. The VM just flew through the installs of sql server and visual studio. Wow. I'm even running the 64 bit tortiose client and it's installing 64 bit IE 9 right now. I'm finally starting to realize the potential of the latest and greatest tempermental hardware.

I'm glad I stuck with VM ware and the 64 bit VM. It also has some quirks I don't like but the performance is going to make it a no brainer.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

I really fucked myself with my VMWare machine. I set the virtual disk to 40 GB thinking it was like Virtual PC and it would just grow the disk as needed. Nope. I expanded it to 80 GB but it's like a physical disk and windows disk manager won't let me grow the volume because it's a boot drive. And I want all my virtual machines to be just one big drive C: so I don't know if I'll be staying with VMWare.

So, ugh, I'm out of space on my new work computer and now I have to revert to the old, 32 bit VPC one. Just when I thought this new VM and I were going to be BFFs.

At least with a physical disk I can use a tool like Acronis on it. Can that be done with a virtual disk? Or am I hosed on having a 80 GB drive C:?

[Freecare Spiritwise]

So VMWare is the only setup that likes my 64 bit hardware, and seeing that my hardware pretty much hates my existing 32 bit VMs no matter which software I use to access them, it's what I'm going to go with for development. I had to re-install my test machine from scratch because I screwed the pooch on the max hard drive size.

It was a really frustrating experience changing the hardware and VM software at the same time and trying to squeeze it in before a big road trip and not lose any productivity coming into a new work week. In the future I think I'll just stick to one thing at a time lol.

But it looks like I'm all set. Thanks for the help, y'all.

P.S. The wife told me she sure hopes the new computer works because she's never giving me the old one back.