What to virtualize?

[DunM@]

Hello all. It's been just about a year since I've been around these parts (thanks for not nuking my account!) so if my manerisms are a bit dated please just slap me around a bit.

So I'm thinking about building a new everything box for work and play. Right now I'm a professional .NET 2/3.5 developer, so windows of some form is mandatory. That said I'm also rather fond of Ubuntu for some things.

My current thinking is this, dual quad-core Xeon box with 8 gigs of ram running Server 2008 (I loves my msdn subscription!), Vista, or Ubuntu, virtualizing either Vista or Ubuntu (whichever isn't native, ahyuck) and XP (I'm not leaving it until I'm VERY sold on vista, and for the time being I'm not).

I have a lot of questions (it's been a while since I've played IT guy instead of dev guy):
I've heard about the Vista DRM interfering (slowing) with network traffic and file copies if music is playing, is there any truth to that? If so, would playing music interfere with an ubuntu vm acting as a fileserver? Would it happen if Server 2008 were the host OS instead of Vista?
Can any Linux virtualization software take advantage of the Xeon's virtualization instructions? If so, which one(s)?
No sshd in Server 2008 wtf? (<-- rhetorical)
Assuming the virtualization software and host OS support the fancy virtualization instructions in the procs, how significant of a performance hit would you expect to see in gaming in virtualized Vista?
Is Vista going to jack around with it's playback resolutions if I run it in a vm (I do not have, nor do I plan to have a bluray drive)?
I can't imagine anything would go wrong if I try to use NFS (or similar) to share a truecrypt partition between all of these OSs, right?
Am I right to not seriously consider XP64?

thanks in advance for your thoughts!

 

[heatlesssun]

I&#8217;m a business software developer myself primarily working with .NET and Windows, but I&#8217;m also starting to support some J2EE apps. My main personal rigs (a tablet pc and the desktop in my sig) are running Vista Ultimate 32bit with 4GB. For now, I feel that 32bits provides the best compatibility and support for all the things I do, from development to gaming and everything between. That might be a misconception on my part, but for now I&#8217;m pretty happy with the setup. I&#8217;m a big Windows Media Center user, and have one PC dedicated for recording TV, and I watch and record TV on my main rig was well and I game too so I chose not to virtualize this setup for now.

I run Ubuntu under Virtual PC 2007 on this Vista rig, and it actually runs ok. I need to try VMWare Server and see who that runs. I&#8217;ve not really tried to do a whole lot with the Ubuntu VM, I&#8217;m running to run it for now. I get my MSDN subscription though work, so Vista is free.

I&#8217;m in the process of setting up a Windows 2008 Server 64bit where I plan on setting up other Windows and Linux VM&#8217;s a cheap SSF PC with 4GB of RAM. Your dual quad-core Xeon will be great for this!

I guess the Vista performance debate still rages. My experience with it has been very positive. I read about the network performance issues and the sound issue you mention, copying of the network does seem a little slower sometimes under Vista but I&#8217;ve not done any formal benchmarking myself. From what I&#8217;ve read, people have tended to notice mostly with gigabit networks, and I do a lot of copying over old 801.11g wireless to my laptop so I guess I would tend to notice anyway.

Just my two cents worth on my setup. Good luck with whatever you end up doing. There are lots of options!

 

[DunM@]

One of my grand plans for this rig is going to be installing visual studio and my main projects to a ramdisk. I expect to see a major performance boost (especially when compiling and unit testing), but to do it right requires 8gb of ram (two for the host OS two for the guest and four for the ramdisk). Definately something to consider.

VMWare Server is pretty nice. My current home server is Ubuntu running in VMWare Server on XP. Granted it's a home server and doesn't see much punishment, but I'm still impressed with how easy and reliable it has been for me.

 

[JustLong]

Since you are using Windows Server 2008 you will be able to use Hyper-V (assuming you hardware supports VT)If I remember correctly the Hyper-V beta is included with 2008. It is a role you can add from Server Manager. For Hyper-V to work you may need to tweak some Bios settings.

Using Hyper-V you should be able to virtualize you Development environment. For best performance I sugest dedicating a physical disk to your Virtual machine. I would also use Server 2003 not vista in your VM.

As for network performance don't buy into the DRM FUD. There is a gigabit network problem with Vista RTM (has nothing to do with DRM), but Sp1 corrects that issue. Windows 2008 has a lot of network performance improvments over Server 2003 many of which are in Vista SP1.

 

[Sharaz Jek]

XP64 ran... as in no trouble installing and getting it up and running and such, but i rean into problem after problem getting apps working right. i tried one or two with [i dont remember what level of success], but then i got to my AV (mcafee enterprise 8.0 or 8.5), and they wouldnt run at all. show stopper.

so i settled on vista64, and have had no problems with any app or game whatsoever.

(so dont bother with XP64).

 

[DunM@]

Using Hyper-V you should be able to virtualize you Development environment. For best performance I sugest dedicating a physical disk to your Virtual machine. I would also use Server 2003 not vista in your VM.

So I did a bit of reading on hyper-v and found this: http://keznews.com/4085_Microsoft&#8217;s_Hyper-V_puts_VMWare_and_Linux_on_notice which (at the bottom) says that Vista isn't happy as a VM because it doesn't work with the intigration tools. Is that still the case?

If so it seems like I would want Server 2008 for the host, XP64 for dev (for the 6bg ram requirement also assuming that xp64 works with the integration tools), XP for games (speed matters), and Ubuntu for linux dev.

Also, would you favor a dedicated drive for each virtual machine or one big raid5 that they all share? I'd have expected better performance out of the raid, but I don't know how much overhead is involved in sharing a disk between VMs...

Thoughts?

 

[JustLong]

So I did a bit of reading on hyper-v and found this: http://keznews.com/4085_Microsoft’s_Hyper-V_puts_VMWare_and_Linux_on_notice which (at the bottom) says that Vista isn't happy as a VM because it doesn't work with the intigration tools. Is that still the case?

If so it seems like I would want Server 2008 for the host, XP64 for dev (for the 6bg ram requirement also assuming that xp64 works with the integration tools), XP for games (speed matters), and Ubuntu for linux dev.

Also, would you favor a dedicated drive for each virtual machine or one big raid5 that they all share? I'd have expected better performance out of the raid, but I don't know how much overhead is involved in sharing a disk between VMs...

Thoughts?

Currently Vista will work decenlty even without the integration tools, but not as well as Server 2003 64. I haven't tried XP 64, but it is basically the Workstation version of Server 2003 so it may work well. Once Hyper-V is no longer a beta I would expect proper Vista 64 support.

RAID 5 has poor read/write performance and Windows VMs do a lot of writing, so I would stay away from it. RAID 5 offers good performance when you have a file server with mostly read access. I would either go with Single disk per VM with frequent backups or a RAID 10 Volume if your controller can support it. At least with the RAID anytime you are running a single VM its Disk I/O will be inproved over the single disk setup.

 

[Skids1]

I am currently running Vista Ultimate 64 (Q6600, 4GB of Ram, P5B Wifi Deluxe, 8800GTS640) and Vmware Workstation with Windows XP. Everything works great! Course I have also disabled all the fancy Aero, etc and done some tweaking to make things a little more responsive.