Hi, I''ve been wanting to build a machine to put xen on, and then have a lots of little OS images running on it. I had to put that project on the back burner, but am re-starting it now. I have some experience with VMWare, and one problem I''ve seen on it is that with non-scsi disks (I am saying non-scsi because I don''t know if it is ATA or SATA), if one machine keeps the the disk busy, then the other virutal machines can''t do anything... I have no idea if it''s a VMWare or a hardware problem. What''s people experience here with xen. Have you had a half a dozen OS, or a dozen OS running with xen on sata disk ? Would one OS bog down the I/O easily ? Thanks. Yves. ---- Yves Dorfsman yves@zioup.com http://www.SollerS.ca _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
On Sat, 2006-11-18 at 23:05 -0700, Yves Dorfsman wrote:> What''s people experience here with xen. Have you had a half a dozen > OS, or > a dozen OS running with xen on sata disk ? Would one OS bog down the > I/O > easily ?I have 2 80 GB ATA (EIDE) drives in my desktop, supporting a dozen or so guests plus me working via KDE on a more active than usual dom-0 .. no issues. No problems on production boxes using SATA + LVM and the standard SATA controller that comes on board. Some boxes even using 3ware raids (big) .. really pleased with the performance. I''ve only ever used SCSI drives to hold swap for guests on servers with over 16GB (and typically lots of swapping guests) to increase swap performance and benefits of having swap to the guests, but storage is always SATA. Maybe you have a bad drive, or the generic IDE driver forgot to say "please" when talking to the controller. :) Best, -Tim _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
Yves Dorfsman wrote:> > Hi, > > I''ve been wanting to build a machine to put xen on, and then have a lots > of little OS images running on it. I had to put that project on the back > burner, but am re-starting it now. > > I have some experience with VMWare, and one problem I''ve seen on it is > that with non-scsi disks (I am saying non-scsi because I don''t know if > it is ATA or SATA), if one machine keeps the the disk busy, then the > other virutal machines can''t do anything... I have no idea if it''s a > VMWare or a hardware problem. > > What''s people experience here with xen. Have you had a half a dozen OS, > or a dozen OS running with xen on sata disk ? Would one OS bog down the > I/O easily ?I have an increasing preference for RAID10 with 4, 6 or 8 disks in those situations. It seems to hold up better under heavy loads then a single disk or RAID1. Things can get pokey, but the huge bandwidth and disk striping make that a short-lived event. Most of the guest OSs we have running on our one box (a 4-disk RAID10 SATA array with 5-6 domains) aren''t all that heavy against the disk array though. So I''m basing my impressions on doing file copies, bonnie++ runs, and just general gut feeling. _______________________________________________ Xen-users mailing list Xen-users@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users