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November 23, 2004
Comparing Apples to Oranges?
After some discussion between Devlin and I. I am starting to wonder if it will even be useful to load anything besides the ESX server on the other machine. The question arises on whether installing an OS on there will be useful when it comes to benchmarking.
Though it would fairly simple to install Windows 2003 Server and some services and see how well they do under load I don't think that is a very fair comparison to a similar setup under virtualization. I don't think it is for a couple of reasons. The main ones though are CPUs and Memory. Where the 6650 has 16 Gig of Ram and 4 CPUs the virtualized version has at most 2 CPUs and 3600 MB of ram.
I suppose to figure out overhead involved with virtualization we could yank the memory and CPUs but I am not sure how much Dr. Windley will want to do that. It needs some more thought I think. Feel free to comment and tell me your ideas.
Posted by nekstrom at 10:27 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Waiting for the SAN
We are at an impass currently. Our biggest limiting factor is disk space. We have aquired various ISOs but have no where to put them so that they can be loaded. We also are limited in the number of machines we can run because we don't have enough space for each machines virtual hard disk.
Currently Devlin has successfully installed Knoppix in a VM and I am trying to install Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition. It is taking a very long time however.
We have installed Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition on the 1750 and we can Remote Desktop into it. I have also installed the VMWare management softare on the 1750 and it can be used to manage our one 6650 that currently has the ESX server running.
Posted by nekstrom at 10:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 05, 2004
Progress!! well some any way
We've made some good progress this week. We have one ESX server up and running. Devlin sucessfully launched KNoppix in a virtual machine. So we know it works. We need to go through and document what it is that we have done but I am feeling too burned out right now to do it, hopefully Monday I will feel more like writing.
Also as a general lab update, serval's firewall was totally open so I went and closed off all ports except 80, 443, 22, and some VNC ports for us to use.
The reason we are using VNC is so that we can use VMWare's console application. The way you talk to a virtual machine is through this console application that hooks up and acts as the monitor for the machine. It gives you all the functionality as if you were sitting right in front of the machine, which is pretty cool. Anyway they don't have a console for OS X and when exporting, X doesn't go between big endian and little endian very well so we run the VNC client over to serval and then use it to open the console to yampa.
Next week we have a meeting with OIT which will hopefully give us some ideas on what to benchmark with and with what OS. I already plan on benchmarking with a couple of linux distributions, but we need to find out if we need to run tests with Windows also. In all things are moving forward.
Posted by nekstrom at 04:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack