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Mike,
I currently use Xen 3.2.0 from SLES 10 SP2. I have several of these machines, backed by an FC SAN. My domUs all use file:-based access (loop devices, essentially) to access their disks. One of those systems (Dell PE1950, 2 x Quad-Core Xeon 2.66 Ghz, 16GB of RAM) runs 20-25 Windows XP SP3-based domUs with no performance issues at all. At initial boot, sometimes there's a good deal of CPU usage on dom0, but that only lasts for a little while, then things settle down. My domUs are (mostly) single vCPU with 384MB of RAM assigned to each domU. I have one that has 1GB of RAM and one that has two vCPUs.
On another machine (identical hardware), I also have a Windows Server 2003 domU running, with 2.5GB of RAM assigned and 2 vCPUs. All of the XP domUs and the Server 2k3 domU use the GPL PV drivers. I'll have to figure out which version - I don't remember the exact release off the top of my head.
I'm not sure what the performance of tap:aio is supposed to be, but loop (file) works fine for me. I can imagine that the software RAID would have a negative impact on performance. Since I'm using SAN-backed volumes for storing my domU files, I'm not running any software RAID inside the domUs or on the dom0s, so that's not an issue for me.
Hope that helps...
-Nick
>>> Mike Williams <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx> 2009/01/06 13:47 >>>
Hey all,
I've been lurking about for a few days now, and I'm already confused :)
At the moment we've got a dual quad-core Intel server running Xen 3.3.0 and 4
XP SP3 domUs, and the performance is horrible. Less than a fifth of the
performance of an XP install straight on a dual-core opteron.
The performance is probably due to the use of GPLPV 0.9.10 (shutdownmon didn't
work with 11), each domU having 2 VCPUs, and the use of tap:aio: over LVM to
get round a weird linux software raid10/LVM/HVM guest issue. It's also
unreliable, but that's a hardware issue.
So, we want to build another machine, and go with Windows 2003 R2 Server
(standard, SP3, I believe), it also won't use software raid10 so we can go
back to phy: (the work load does very little disk IO anyway). The hardware
will be exactly the same.
Could anyone advise me on the best means to install 2k3 R2, with 2 CPUs per
domU, and GPLPV, please?
Thanks
--
Mike Williams
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