Re: [Xen-users] The death of XEN by Novell

[Florian Manschwetus <florianmanschwetus@xxxxxx>]

Mark Williamson schrieb:
> On Sunday 20 July 2008, jim burns wrote:
> > On Sun July 20 2008 9:51:52 am Venefax wrote:
> > > The Novell engineer showed me a technical document, which I did not write
> > > the number, on the Novell web site, where it said: windows SMP using the
> > > Novell driver crashes.
> > That's what I thought - the problem is with Novell's PV drivers, not Xen.
> > James had some initial problems with SMP also.
> Right, that's important.  Novell's PV drivers are their code so those drivers 
> might have limitations that plain Xen does not.  Presumably it would be 
> possible to run using fully emulated IO instead of PV drivers but I imagine 
> this could have performance problems in your configuration.  Could be worth a 
> try, if you can afford to experiment.
> If the Windows VMs themselves are crashing due to Novell's PV drivers then I'm 
> afraid this limitation / problem is really Novell's responsibility and they 
> would be the best people to approach for assistance / complaints.  The code 
> for those drivers isn't open, so only Novell can fix them.  If the Novell PV 
> drivers are somehow crashing your Linux domains or dom0 or Xen itself then 
> that might be a Xen bug and it would be useful to post more details here.
> For comparison, Citrix/XenSource supply with their product PV drivers for 
> Windows that are - AFAIK - a different codebase and may not have these 
> limitations.  So do Virtual Iron, for their Xen-based product.  Both of these 
> can only be used with their respective commercial hypervisors, AFAIK.  James 
> Harper's PV drivers for Windows are GPL but still under development and so I 
> doubt they'd be recommended for heavy production use.
> There are a lot of different PV driver solutions for Windows about and none of 
> them are officially part of the OSS Xen project; only one of them is even 
> Open Source.
I really wonder why you run your SQL servers in windows and all the rest 
in Linux???
I asume especially for databases is Windows a bad base, but i have a 
win20008 sharepoint running on xen 3.2.1 with 2 vcpus it works great and 
stable with james drives.
And if you like to use this single Box, you may ask SUN (Solaris and 
SunXvm).
florian

> > >  I use a SIP Server on the Linux side, talking hundreds of times per
> > > second to SQL Server, so I need SMP 8 ways on both  ends.
> > Something I've never seen you actually say is that you *tried* vcpu=1, and
> > the performance was bad. So far, it sounds like theory to me. Even with 1
> > vcpu, playing with scheduling weights should help.
> Venefax, are you able to try this?
>
> Thank you,
> Mark

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