VM Server Hosting

May 25, 2005

My friend Josh Carlisle was kind enough to host this website during my move to California. Josh set me up with a Microsoft Virtual Server slice of Windows 2003 Standard on his Xeon 2.8 server. I'm currently running a WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySql, Perl) configuration which I was able to set up remotely without issue.

Although everything is generally running quite well, and the commit charge is well under 256mb in Task Manager, I am disappointed with VM performance ..again. Intel's Xeon 2.8ghz is basically just a rebranded Pentium 4 2.8ghz, but that's still way more performance than I need. Unfortunately, under actual use, it performs more like a 1.4ghz Pentium 4-- the older version with only 512kb L2 cache! HTTP post operations that used to take under a second take multiple seconds; installs that used to be a minute long take upwards of five minutes, etcetera.

VMs are great for convenience, but the performance cost is quite a bit higher than I expected it to be-- on both client and server. Even if you aren't emulating the x86 processor, the cost of emulating the motherboard hardware is clearly substantial. Particularly for disk and video. I found this list of Virtual Server performance tips, although it's not very server specific-- it's basically the same advice I've seen for Virtual PC. No silver bullet there; get the fastest disks you can afford, dedicate them to VMs, and make sure you have enough memory. Virtual PC guy also has some interesting tips for remote desktop-ing into a virtual server.

Posted by Jeff Atwood
5 Comments

I would agree in part to your experience with Virtual Server. Under normal situations I would not host a production environment on a virtual server for a variety of reasons but it does come as an outstanding solution for development and temporary environments such as yours.

Saying that I still believe that a majority (not all for sure) of your experience with Virtual Server has a good bit to do with my configuration. First off there is ALOT on that server which is a big no-no for a virtual server environment. Second you're on an older ATA100 IDE drive and lastly I haven't disabled hyperthreading which throws off the internal CPU balancing mechanisms in virtual server (it thinks you're on dual processor server - which you are... just minus the second processor lol).

I have felt your pain during the installs, it was PAINFULLY slow, however I havn't experienced any general slowness when accessing the site but then again I'm also not posting anything :)

If I had to do it again I'd like to see the experience with:
- Dedicated 64bit Server(AMD not Intel)
- SATA2 10000rpm drive or SCSI 15000 RPM drive
- Disable HyperThreading
- Healthy Bit of RAM (2gb+)

I'll look forward to finding out at least in part what the difference is when I get my new server in next month and pull some stuff off of my poor server :).

I don't have any experience with VMWare but my last shop had high regards for it and we used it for several of our development environments. I do agree with you jeff though that VM technology in general is moving in the right direction but it's not quite there yet.

Josh Carlisle on May 26, 2005 4:37 AM

does come as an outstanding solution for development and temporary environments such as yours

Yep, and it's working very well for me, my impatience notwithstanding ;)

I also read that Intel (and presumably AMD) are including virtualization features in the CPU hardware as well. That should help.

Jeff Atwood on May 26, 2005 5:54 AM

does come as an outstanding solution for development and temporary environments such as yours

Yep, and it's working very well for me, my impatience notwithstanding ;)

I also read that Intel (and presumably AMD) are including virtualization features in the CPU hardware as well. That should help.

Jeff Atwood on May 26, 2005 5:54 AM

including virtualization features in the CPU hardware as well

Er, this should read FUTURE cpu hardware:

a href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20040912113927.html"http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20040912113927.html/a

Jeff Atwood on May 26, 2005 12:14 PM

I wonder if there are any articles out there comparing Microsofts Virtual PC and VMWare... I've run both VM Workstation 4 on my laptop and we have a VM ESX server (running on top of Red Hat). I realize VMWare is probably out of your budget and the ESX server surely is but it is proof that virtual machines can perform well..

Our current ESX server is spliced up into about 5 virtual machines. A few of them run Sharepoint sites, a few are IIS, and a few Win2k3 servers for development/testing purposes.

The ESX server is *awesome*. It's performance is fantastic and none of the "virtual boxes" have had any downtime as of yet (going on 5 months since we deployed).

We're even thinking of deploying an entire engineering platform on the VM Ware ESX server for our locations in China and Europe. Get a highly redundant server and you have a "one box solution". Keep images handy of your PDM system, your Orcale9i server, a webserver, etc. and easily deploy it anywhere in the world just by flipping a switch! Sounds cool in our heads atleast ;-)

Of course, as a privately held company which grossed a little over $500mill last year we probably have a touch larger IT budget :-)

Nick on May 26, 2005 12:19 PM

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