RE: [gentoo-user] Re: Mini Gentoo in VMWare

["Daevid Vincent" <daevid@daevid.com>]

I use a Gentoo VM for a lot of LAMP dev work, and I can tell you it's kind
of painful to upgrade packages with all the compiling. VMWare is slower than
normal to compile, mostly due to disk I/O. Since each HD is a big-ass file. 

A few optimizations I might suggest:

Partition a dedicated physical hard drive into chunks and use VMWare's "raw"
disk so you have real hardware/hard disks. I'd suggest a very fast SCSI
drive for the best performance since you're running several VMs.

Also, look into the VMWare server version which uses the raw iron a bit
better as it's dedicated to running many VMs. 

I find that more RAM on VMWare has a point of deminishing returns. I have a
VM that I dedicate 512MB of my 2GBs and honestly it feels slower than when I
give it 128-256MB only. It may be a WinXP thing that it's not efficiently
using the RAM right or something.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Trenton Adams [mailto:trenton.d.adams@gmail.com] 
> Sent: Sunday, November 05, 2006 9:19 PM
> To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
> Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Mini Gentoo in VMWare
> 
> Yes, VMWare is fit for the task, simply because I would be using it on
> a windows machine.  Unless there is something better for a windows
> machine?
> 
> Thanks for the hints.
> 
> On 11/3/06, Harm Geerts <harmgeerts@home.nl> wrote:
> > On Friday 03 November 2006 06:43, Trenton Adams wrote:
> > > Hi Guys,
> > >
> > > Has anyone here played with minimalizing everything for 
> use in vmware?
> > >
> > > Basically what I want to do is create a series of VERY 
> tiny VMs that
> > > are all independent of each other, which provide one service.  For
> > > instance, I might put apache on one VM, and tomcat on 
> another, and so
> > > on.  Obviously, I would want their memory usage to be absolutely
> > > minimized, seeing that I would like to run them all on 
> one computer.
> > > I would probably provide them 64M-128M of RAM each, for 
> their specific
> > > service.  Perhaps a little more if really required.
> > >
> > > Is there really anything that I should worry about?  
> Perhaps I should
> > > just DO IT?
> >
> > Nick[1] made a post about minimizing Gentoo a while back.
> > But that topic was mainly about the disk usage.
> > I suppose you would benefit from a system that uses the -Os 
> flag to create
> > small binairies.
> >
> > But do you think vmware is fit for such a task?
> > vmware is a big strain on resources itself.
> > You might want to have a look at xen[2] instead.
> >
> > [1] 
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/160899/focus=160903
> > [2] http://www.xensource.com/xen/xen/index.html
> > --
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> >
> >
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> 

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