Have you noticed any VmWare server 2 performance issues? Can it be used for less important production systems?
Vmware server 2 performance
vmware-server
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Is there a reason you're running VMware Server instead of ESXi? ESXi is free, and will give you significantly better performance, both in terms of Disk/Network IO as well as CPU and memory performance as well.
What you're seeing is is pretty normal - you're getting high levels of IO contention on the host and everybody is being forced to wait their turn for the physical resources of the server. To fix this, consider moving to ESX, ESXi, or possibly using faster hard drives.
With all due respect to my fellow netizens here, I don't think your question was thoroughly read by others who answered. The general assumption is to slam OpenBSD with assumptions that don't pan out in actual use conditions, when really your main piece of information was that PHP was chewing up the CPU the most. There are multiple questions that should have been asked:
since this situation can easily be a performance-inefficient php.ini or httpd.conf configuration, are you definitely using the same version of PHP on both platforms?
Which Apache were you using on each system (obsd by default in 5.2 uses it's own 1.3 security-enhanced version, but Debian would default to Apache 2.0, making your results very skewed).
What is your configuration of the vm's themselves in VMWare (drives, nics, etc.)?
One reason to point to the bias in the other answers is:
- the Theo quote is 7 years old.
- that i386 is actually the preferred version of OBSD over the AMD64 version for virtualization.
- both actually can run well in VMWare with the OBSD5.5 and likely 5.6 (the current version).
- there is no question of the configuration of the vm's being compared, just a judgement that it (paraphrasing) 'will probably suck'.
Best Answer
The performance for VMware Server 2 is decent. I always try to get the fastest hard drives, since that takes the biggest overhead hit from the virtualization layer. I would not recommend running database servers on VMware Server 2 unless the load is very light.
If you are new to VMware, then I would gradually add virtual machines and monitor their performance. I usually weight (on performance impact) hard drives, then RAM, then CPU.