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POAnyone benchmarked virtual machine performance for build servers?
 

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  1. POAnyone benchmarked virtual machine performance for build servers?
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    <p>We have been trying to use virtual machines for build servers. Our build servers are all running WinXP32 and we are hosting them on VMWare Server 2.0 running on Ubuntu 9.10. We build a mix of C, C++, python packages, and other various deployment tasks (installers, 7z files, archives, etc). The management using VMWare hosted build servers is great. We can move them around, shared system resources on one large 8-core box, remotely access the systems through a web interface, and just basically manage things better.</p> <p>But the problem is that the performance compared to using a physical machine seems to range from bad to horrid depending upon what day it is. It has proven very frustrating. Sometimes the system load for the host will go above 20 and some times it will be below 1. It doesn't seem to be based on how much work is actually being done on the systems. I suspect there is a bottleneck in the system, but I can't seem to figure out what it is. (most recent suspect is I/O, but we have a dedicated 1TB 7200RPM SATA 2 drive with 32MB of cache doing nothing but the virtual machines. Seems like enough for 1-2 machines. All other specs seem to be enough too. 8GB RAM, 2GB per VM, 8 cores, 1 per vm).</p> <p>So after exhausting everything I can think of, I wanted to turn to the Stack Overflow community.</p> <ul> <li>Has anyone run or seen anyone else run benchmarks of software build performance within a VM. </li> <li>What should we expect relative to a physical system? </li> <li>How much performance are we giving up? </li> <li>What hardware / vm server configurations are people using?</li> </ul> <p>Any help would be greatly appreciated.</p>
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    1. COI'd guess your single drive is a big issue - especially if you are running multiple builds...
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    2. COHave you tried running some performance monitoring to look at the usual suspects?
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      1. POAnyone benchmarked virtual machine performance for build servers?
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    3. COI tried performance monitoring tools on the host and the client. On the client it looks like disk I/O is the problem, but when looking at the host usage of the disk using dstat it doesn't look like it is stressing the system. It almost looks like vmware itself is the bottleneck but I can't nail it down for sure. That is the most frustrating part. I can't seem to track down the exact point that is causing the problem.
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