VMWare ESX and FBSD 7.2 AMD64 guest

[Steve Bertrand]

This message has a foot that has nearly touched down over the OT borderline.

We received an HP Proliant DL360G5 collocation box yesterday that has
two processors, and 8GB of memory.

All the client wants to use this box for is a single instance of Windows
web hosting. Knowing the sites the client wants to aggregate into IIS, I
know that the box is far over-rated.

Making a long story short, they have agreed to allow us to put their
Windows server inside of a virtual-ized container, so we can use the
unused horsepower for other vm's (test servers etc).

My problem is performance. I'm only willing to make this box virtual if
I can keep the abstraction performance loss to <25% (my ultimate goal
would be 15%).

The following is what I have, followed by my benchmark findings:

# 7.2-RELEASE AMD64

FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE #0: Fri May  1 07:18:07 UTC 2009
    root at driscoll.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC

Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU            5150  @ 2.66GHz (2666.78-MHz
K8-class CPU)
  Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x6f6  Stepping = 6

usable memory = 8575160320 (8177 MB)
avail memory  = 8273620992 (7890 MB)

FreeBSD/SMP: Multiprocessor System Detected: 4 CPUs
 cpu0 (BSP): APIC ID:  0
 cpu1 (AP): APIC ID:  1
 cpu2 (AP): APIC ID:  6
 cpu3 (AP): APIC ID:  7:

Benchmarks:

# time make -j4 buildworld (under vmware)

5503.038u 3049.500s 1:15:46.25 188.1%   5877+1961k 3298+586716io 2407pf+0w

# time make -j4 buildworld (native)

4777.568u 992.422s 33:02.12 291.1%	6533+2099k 25722+586485io 3487pf+0w

...both builds were from the exact same sources, and both runs were
running with the exact same environment. I was extremely careful to
ensure that the environments were exactly the same.

I'd appreciate any feedback on tweaks that I can make (either to VMWare,
or FreeBSD itself) to make the virtualized environment much more efficient.

Off-list is fine.

Cheers,

Steve


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