[Xen-users] Virtual machine(s) performance questions

[Jason Brooks <jason@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I am getting ready to convert a server from Uni-processor to xen.  I  
am curious about a few things:
1) Is there an ideal disk setup for virtual machines?  There are many  
combinations I could try.  Here are some examples I have seen.  Am I  
missing something?  I assume the following in order of highest to  
lowest performance.
        - direct hard disk access to a raid0 partition...
        - direct hard disk access is the fastest
	- direct partition access (with partitions shared with other vm's  
including dom0)
	- direct access to a lvm partition (lvm operations governed by dom0  
or driver domain)
        - <insert other combinations here>
        
        - sparse file on dom0's filesystem.

2) It's apparent I should not assign more memory total to all domU and  
dom0 vm's.  Are there proportions I can optimize with?  How about the  
hypervisor: Should I allocate more memory to it?
3) It seems apparent that I shouldn't have more vm's and processors  
than physically exist.  Is this true?  How should I compute the total  
physical system load?  Under a non-vm, I can look at the load averages  
of a system to determine how "loaded" a system is.  Is there a way to  
do this with all vm's?  xentop seems limited...
4) Does sharing filesystems between vm's work better with nfs or GFS?

Thanks for your info, and time...

--jason



_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users