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Re: [Xen-users] Hardware requirements for Xen


  • To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • From: Steve Thompson <smt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2012 16:59:14 -0400 (EDT)
  • Delivery-date: Mon, 04 Jun 2012 21:00:33 +0000
  • List-id: Xen user discussion <xen-users.lists.xen.org>

On Mon, 4 Jun 2012, baileyp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

   So, in short -- I'm looking to replace about 30 WinXP desktops with VM's 
hosted by Xen, and I
need to figure out how much memory and CPU power I'll need to make this 
feasible.

I am running 31 KVM VM's on a Dell R710 server with CentOS 5.8. The server has 8 cores at 3.06 GHz and 48 GB memory and has hyperthreading turned on (for 16 logical cores total). The server has a lot more CPU bandwidth than required _for my workload_, except possibly when all the VM's are booting at the same time. In normal production use, the CPU usage rarely goes over 25%. But of course if your VM's are all running a CPU-intensive workload at the same time, you will want a core for each of them. If I did it again, I'd use just 4 cores and maybe 64 GB memory. But pay particular attention to your disk storage; I am using four 450 GB 15K RPM SAS disks in a RAID-5 configuration; this is _just_ enough I/O bandwidth. I used to run Xen on this server before I switched to KVM, and the CPU requirements were considerably higher then.

Steve
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