I know this is probably not what you want to hear... but for our critical Windows applications we ended up switching to Citrix XenServer with the included PV drivers. The performance and stability is night and day -- a year later we have still had zero issues since the switch. It is truely production ready and performs very well in SMP.
Although the open source PV drivers for XenSource have come a long way, they are still far from production-ready (even a year now since we tried them!) and should only be used in development or personal setups.
--
Randy
www.FastServ.com
---------- Original Message -----------
From: "Venefax" <venefax@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sat, 27 Dec 2008 22:01:29 -0500
Subject: [Xen-devel] Windows SMP
> I think that we need to tackle the absurd loss of performance that any Windows HVM incurs with more than one processor. I have measured it and it is amazing. I have an application that opens 15 independent network clients, and with one single processor and the Standard PC Hal, it takes a little over a minute to load the 15 clients and also to register with the SIP provider. If I leave that unchanged, I mean âceteris paribusâ , and only change the HAL to ACPI and add 8 processors, then the same operation takes over 10 minutes. Hello!!! I am using the GPLVL drivers from James Harper. Right now I am about to test the MPS âNon-ACPI HAL, but the driver still create a BSOD. Maybe the problem is only ACPI, and not MPS, who knows. In any case, what can we do so any Windows virtual machine can achieve a ânormalâ performance, I mean, a linear performance when using more processors and not this declining curve that can kill any host.
> Federico
>
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------- End of Original Message -------
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