Can anyone point me to VMware workstation benchmarks for compile workload?
Been looking for a while and I can't find any. It's a bit weird - this is supposedly a developer oriented product. Full compile of our project usually takes about 4 minutes.
I am currently using VMware workstation for development. Guest OS is Linux and the host is Windows. I don't use much of the VMware workstation features like snapshots - I have my code repository for that and I can re-create my dev environment within 10 minutes tops. I just prefer Windows font rendering, so I ssh (putty) to my VM and develop from console.
I am wondering how much compile performance I am sacrificing versus native. If there is a considerable difference (30% or more), perhaps it is more practical to have a dedicated/native dev box.
For background, In 2005/2006 or so I worked on a very large project based on linux and using Tuxedo and Informix.
We virtualized the environment for each developer with VMWare and also had 2 separate groups of machines for Q/A and staging.
Builds were done on the machines for which they were targeted for "consistency."
Unless we asked for make to run more jobs than we had CPUs (make -j 4 on a 2 CPU machine) the virtual machines build time was within 5 to 10% of the real machines.
As I recall, our makefiles reported build times of apx 18 to 20 minutes on a real machine and 20 to 24 on a virtual machine.
The virtual machines also bogged down from heavy network or disk IO.
Related
I have setup my development environment inside Virtual Machine running Ubuntu 14.04. My company doesn't allow me to run direct Linux Flavoured OS may be due to security reasons.
One thing I have observed is that in VM it only runs one task ast a time whereas if i run on my personal laptop it runs multiple tasks at a time.
Is there any way to configure poky in local.conf file for example or any other file for it to run multiple tasks at the same time. I have given more than 6 GB of RAM to the VM.
As it is running one task, build is taking a lot of time..
Thanks for your time
bitbake task executor enquires for number of CPUs dynamically, so it seems that you might have allocated 1 cpu to your VM. You might be able to see CPUs with below command in VM
lscpu
You might want to allocate more CPUs. VirtualBox lets you do that
Stop virtual machine
Click settings-> click system -> click processor -> Change the number of procesors.
i am trying to measure code performance (basically speed-up when using threads). So far i was using cygwin via windows or linux on separate machine. Now i have the ability to set up a new system and i am not sure whether i should have dual boot (windows and ubuntu) or a virtual machine.
My concern is whether i can measure reliable speed up and possibly other stuff (performance monitors) via a linux virtual machine or if i have to go with with normal booting in linux.
anybody have an opinion?
If your "threading" relies heavily on scheduling, I won't recommend you to use VM. VM is just a normal process from the host OS's point of view, so the guest kernel and its scheduler will be affected by scheduling by the host kernel.
If your "threading" is more like parallel computation, I think it's OK to use VM.
For me, it is much safer to boot directly on the system and avoid using a VM in your case. Even when you don't use a VM, it is already hard to have twice the same results in multi-threading because the system being used for OS tasks, so having 2 OS running in the same time as for VM even increases the uncertainty on the results. For instance, running your tests 1000 times on a VM would lead to, let's say, 100 over-estimated time, while it would maybe be only 60 on a lonely OS. It is your call to know if this uncertainty is acceptable or not.
Of course my target Linux is running on a 32 bit MCU. So are there any restrictions if my host environment is running on a 64 bit system?
Or should I just take the 32bit host version and not care about the 64 bit version. I mean the only thing I am doing is build applications for my embedded device. Or are there any speed advantages on a 64 bit host system regarding GCC compilation, QT programming , etc...
What is your personal point of view on this?
Technically, no real change happens.
But, from my personal experience, you may encounter problems if you have to copy the development environment to another computer and you don't want to do a complete setup (for example: a broken host, or having to do maintenance after several months to the code, possibly not done by the same author of the original code and/or nobody remembers how they did the setup when the development was started). Using a 64 bits limits this "portability". For now there are multiarch distributions like Debian, you can face even more problems if you need to quickly set up another machine.
This is why I ended with using virtual machines running 32 bits GNU/Linux: if you need to quickly setup a new computer, just copy a bunch of files, make sure you have virtualbox or vmware installed on the new pc and you're almost done.
< skippable part >
I work in IT (mostly desktop support and network administration) in a Windows environment, and I occasionally program.
A couple weeks ago, I decided I couldn't be as effective as I want to be without a Bash environment for my command prompt needs. This is especially true when I am using Ruby and git. I used Msysgit for a while, but I just didn't like how it wasn't extensible like Linux. So, I installed Cygwin and played around with that for a couple weeks.
As great as Cygwin is, it seems like it is meant to be a suped up command prompt, and its compatibility with Linux is just a pleasant side effect. This especially became evident when I tried to upgrade Ruby to 1.9.3 (it worked, but it wasn't straightforward), install rvm (never worked), and install RMagick (may or may not work, but looks like a headache).
So, now I'm considering running Linux in a virtual machine. But I'm worried that might be another can of worms and I'll have wasted hours before I find that out. I like that Cygwin runs in Windows and I get to use my IDE, user folder, and more with it. But I don't like that support for it is not as thorough as for a major distro.
< /skippable part >
Does anyone here have insight on using Cygwin vs running a Linux virtual machine?
Any advice on setting up a Linux development environment in a virtual machine within Windows?
I have faced common issues before, and the best solution according to my experience is just 2 workstations :).
Apart from that having Linux running in a virtual environment is way better.
First of all, you will have full Linux capabilities (except 3d acceleration, but you probably don't need that).
You will have the capability of creating snapshots and revert back to them when things go wrong!
You can start multiple environment using templates, which is very convenient.
The only downfall I can think of is performance issues of the host machine.
If it's a normal workstation/PC, an IDE + one virtual machine + a 100+tabs browser just makes it slow.
1: cygwin is good for quick hacks, and for being able to acces host-os resources(you can run IE for example in a bash script). For something tightly integrated and some "real" word, go to a vm. It will emulate everything and separate development from the real machine, and this may be a good thing in some cases... as a plus it simulates a real server:)
2: in virtualbox at least, you have shared folders, and you can share a local folder, and see it in the vm as a local folder(local or as a windows share..it actually depends). Then you can use that "entry point" to symlink stuff into the vm, and do the things you need with the real files being located in the real(host) machine
SSH into a linux box. This is what everyone does. Why isn't this the answer?
There is something I have heard of called Cooperative Linux. It runs Linux alongside with Windows kernel so you can use them at the same time. I've never used it, but here:
http://www.colinux.org/
What I think now is getting the pros of 2 options is using
Docker
, it is giving you cygwin simplicity and VM functionality with better performance.
Linux in a virtual machine will give you the experience you want more than cygwin or any mock shell as I like to call them.
Running VM's though require a lot of ram depending on whether you want a desktop version of linux or just a command line version.
Myself in work I have a pc with 8gb of ram and I run ubuntu 64bit as main OS, two ubuntu servers (these are for dev environments two different projects) and a windows 7 VM and a win XP VM.
I can run the two ubuntu servers and one other VM at the same time, key here is more ram if you want to be able to do VM's.
If you're going to be working with Ruby then get an Ubuntu virtual machine up and running :) I've not tried Ruby, etc on Windows but I have heard that it is a pain to setup and configure. I use a Mac for all my Rails development so I cannot comment on the Windows side for that.
As for virtual machine creation, I prefer VMware Workstation, however there are free alternatives such as Virtualbox and VMware Server.
I'm using a Linux VM within a Windows seven environment as this VM is as representative as possible of the final production environment. The whole setup is binded to the Eclipse IDE under ms-Windows seven. So this is really great for local full testing, before committing or tagging the tested version to the production servers.
As you mentioned as well, this takes some time to get properly setup and fully configured. So if your need is only for little tricks or tasks, you may keep using cygwin. For example, I faced significant issues to configure perl and compile mysql within cygwin. So it's ok for basic usages, but not to fully take advantage of a full linux environment.
Your choice strongly depends on the final server setup purpose. A VM will do it whatever your need is. The setup cost for it is higher, so this time investment must be used often to get returned.
We have a physical machine that runs VMware and hosts a VM we use for SharePoint deployment testing. That machine is old and dying, and my employer's network czars are heavily pushing hosted VMs as a replacement for outdated physical servers. I was curious about whether it's possible to run VMware inside VMware, and if so, whether there are severe performance implications. We don't require extreme performance from this setup, since it's just used for SharePoint testing and the associated SQL Server is on a different box. My guess is that we can't just use the primary hosted VM for our testing because we'll want to roll back occasionally and otherwise have more control over it, and getting buy-in for that from the network folks is unlikely. Does anyone have any experience with this?
edit: I know this nesting certainly isn't the preferred option, but (1) we want the flexibility of being able to use VMware snapshots at will and (2) the network folks will not allow us to arbitrarily roll back to a previous point in time because of the potential for removing mandated security updates. My guess is that a local desktop machine running VMware Workstation might just be the way to go. The hosted option seems attractive if it will work though since it's less machine maintenance for me to deal with.
The technical limitation with running VMware inside VMware is that VMware, Virtual PC, etc takes advantage of the Virtualization features present in modern CPUs.
If you have two or more hypervisors are both trying to control Ring 0 then there will be problems, this is something that I've encountered while trying to run both VMware and Virtual PC simultaneously on my desktop - one will error out/crash.
If your hypervisor can interact with the 'parent' hypervisor, then you'll be OK. Alternatively if the child hypervisor doesn't try to use the CPU virtualization features, or entirely emulates the CPU (such as QEMU) then you should also be OK.
Basically old-style hypervisors on old CPUs use Full virtualization (slow) which would be capable of nesting with a heavy, heavy performance hit. modern Hypervisors/CPUs use hardware assisted virtualization (near native performance) and you'd be hard pressed to find a hypervisor that is designed or capable of nested virtual machines.
Finally, I'd really advise against running dev/test VMs on the same physical server that is running production VMs. There's just too much to go wrong and security implications - you need to manage the dev/test environment and it sounds like you shouldn't have access to production environment. Likewise you probably don't want the operations team messing about with your test environment.
UPDATE: ESXi 4 now supports virtualizing itself. See this article for more information
I've never run VMware in VMware, but I've run VirtualPC inside VirtualBox without problems, so there's no fundamental reason it shouldn't work I suppose...
It sounds to me more like you have a problem with the inflexibility of your "network czars" than any technical one. If you're a developer or QA you need a testing environment where you can fool around with outdated (and potentially insecure) versions of the OS and applications, without putting the rest of the company network at risk.
Ex-VMware employee here.
Firstly, when you say Nested VMware I will assume you mean Nested ESXi. (You could also mean Workstation, Fusion, or Player).
Nested ESXi environments are unsupported and should not be used for production. These scenarios are not tested in QA and not guaranteed to work. In short, if you experience any kind of problem, VMware will not help you with this Nested ESXi setup.
With that said, yes you can do it and yes it does work. A lot of people use nested ESXi in their labs but not in production. Previously there were special configuration file edits that were necessary for nested ESXi to work. I have seen environments with even 3 layer nested ESXi servers (ESXi vm on and ESXi vm on a physical ESXi host). More recently there is the ESXi appliance which makes this much easier.
Have a look here:
http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2015/12/deploying-nested-esxi-is-even-easier-now-with-the-esxi-virtual-appliance.html
I ran into this same problem. I work at a large company where our entire infrastructure is virtual, so if you need a server you get a VMware VM. So I had a couple of Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition based Guest VM's that had 6GB of memory and 200 GB of disk space, but I wanted to run linux and a LAMP stack on them. So I tried to install VMware Workstation on one and I got an error message saying it couldn't be installed within a VM. I also tried Microsoft Virtual PC and got a similar error message. I installed Sun's VirtualBox and that installed fine, but I couldn't get the networking to work w/in the guest Ubuntu OS. My next step is to try QEMU although performance might become an issue.
You ought to have a look at Mainframes - they are Virtualised from the word go:
Hardware - runs Hypervisor Type 1 - Level 1
on this you have zVM - Type 2 Hypervisor - Level 2
on this you have zOS - your main big operating system - Level 3
and/or
on this you have zLinux - Level 3
and/or
on this you have zVM for testing next version - Level 3
and/
on this you have zOS for testing zVM plus zOS both at next version - Level 4
So going down to level 4 is pretty common
Mind you on a Mainframe you can have 1000's of VMs running at the same time - and most sites who start using zVM/CMS and zVM/Linux usually do.
I can see two solutions for this (three if you count a VM inside a VM which is just crazy).
New hardware, which should be robust enough to handle several VM's used specifically for testing (sharpoint, etc.). In this situation your team could be given more rights without affecting non-testing VM's.
Sharepoint test VM's are moved to the main VM pool and those who need access are given the ability to checkout/deploy/rollback testing resources. This could be direct through VMWare tools or through an internal project that works through a VMWare API.
This should be a joint decision between Network/Dev/Testing.
JFYI:
I tried installing and running VMware ESXi server host(child ESXi server) as a virtual machine(on parent ESXi server) and it runs however you can not run any VMs under child ESXi server.
I am doing practice of VMware vSphere Data center virtualization on single Physical machine. There is VMware Workstation installed on Windows 8 OS. In VM Workstation, I have installed Windows Server 2008 OS, VMware ESXi OS and created the VMware Data center LAB. There is VMs running in LAB, and its confirm that We can user VMware in VMware. But it depends on your need, and Products which is chosen.
You can install ESXi on VMware Workstation, it's usefull to learn ESXi, so there in no reason run VMware in VMware.
Yes. You can run VMWare inside VMWare. Though its not officially supported, You can deploy VMs in the child ESX. I have checked for an advanced feature like PassThrough the HBA card but which was not available in child ESX, hence I could not provide a LUN from array.
So in production its better to not use this.
But for training and practices this can be used.
You can do that.
You can install vmware esxi inside virtual machine of another vmware esxi.
But the performance will be very bad.
Totally works.. totally can't do it other then for some kinda testing or some kind of educational purpose, because you won't get support. and from my limited experience it doesn't perform that well.
Yes, you can, VMware can even detect if it's running inside of another vmware machine and warn you that VMception will cause worse performance. which it will, trust me, just try to get the version the virtual machines work best in a physical machine, as to get as much performance possible.
"whether it's possible to run VMware inside VMware" What?
I can run Windows with Sharepoint in a VMWare machine that's hosted somewhere.
Or, I can run Windows with Sharepoint in a WMWare machine that's actually a VMWare machine that's hosted somewhere.
Why on earth would I add a level of nesting? Why not just go with Windows with Sharepoint hosted somewhere?
You can have any number of VMWares running on a single host. Lots of different versions doing lots of different things.
Nesting them doesn't make sense.