Physical to virtual windows 2003 server doubts
Hello all,
I am trying to virtualize a windows 2003 server that was prevously installed on a machine with a sate drive. To do this, i booted the server with a linux livecd and copied the whole sate disc with the dd command, creating a raw image file.
Now i want to boot the raw img file with kvm. There is where my doubts starts:
1) Will i have to boot the raw image with a scsi kvm drive option like: qemu -localtime -usb -usbdevice tablet -m 1024 -net nic -net user -boot c -cdrom /media/disk/cyrofilho/Downloads/iso/winxpsp3_ptbr.iso -drive index=0,media=disk,if=scsi,file=teste.img,boot=on or i can use a -hda teste.img option withou problems? Is booting kvm images with scsi emulation stable?
2) I am using kvm-72, how are the network io and disk io performance right now? Is it close to the real hardware? Can i use a database server virtualized for example without big io performance penalty?
3) My server has two quad core processors, so i have a total of 8 cores on the server. If i run kvm without the smp 8 option will my virtual machine use all cores? I ask that because to use smp option i have to enable acpi on windows, and i had read that using windows without acpi is much faster with kvm. So is it better to use kvm with smp 8 option and windows with acpi or without the smp 8 option?
Thanks very much for any help. I really need these answers to decide if i will use or not virtualization for this server.
Cyro
Hi Cryo,
To answer your questions 2 and 3
To achieve best network and disk I/O right now with KVM, your best solution is using paravirtual network and disk drivers. I see that you're using a windows guest so the issue there is that there's currently no virtio disk drivers for windows, only network. If you use virtio network drivers over a bridged tap interface, you should get very good network performance. For windows, the advice is to use scsi disks for best performance but I have no experience with this.
If you don't use smp 8 your machine will still use your 8 processors from the host point of view as your machine is just a linux process. From your guest point of view, you'll be using a uniprocessor machine.. just one with the power of 8 cpus so it's fine to run it without smp 8.
As far as booting your scsi, I don't think qemu bios supports scsi but I will double check and confirm this.
>If you don't use smp 8 your machine will still use your 8 processors from the host point of view as your machine is just a linux process. From your >guest point of view, you'll be using a uniprocessor machine.. just one with the power of 8 cpus so it's fine to run it without smp 8.
Off-topic, but does anyone knows if this is true with vmware server 1.0 too? thanks!
In server 2003 one folder was shared,some of the user only access the data,now entire user access the data but now sharing options is disable ,plz any one can tell the solution for this issue............
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