[geeks] VMware and CentOS

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Ido Dubrawsky <idubraws at dubrawsky.org>
>Date: 2008/03/27 Thu PM 02:15:38 CST
>To: geeks at sunhelp.org
>Subject: [geeks] VMware and CentOS

<snip>

>My suspicion is that it's VMware Server that's destabilizing the system 
>since ever since I installed VMware Server 1.0.5 this morning it has 
>been crashing even MORE frequently.  Has anyone else had similar 
>experiences?  Should I migrate to XenSource?  Any other recommendations. 
>I'd like to keep this box as a virtual lab but I really need it to be 
>stable.

I've only run VMware on Windows boxes (WinXP Pro to be precise) with IDE/SATA storage solutions and only on P4 or greater CPUs.

I have to believe (but I'm willing to be wrong ;^) that if your IO is increasing, so too is your CPU, and I think a PIII is about minimum spec for VMware Server. I suspect your entire workload is overwhelming your box, and wonder if you tried to recreate the problem without running VMware Server (isolate the OS/drivers)? Maybe just start flopping big files around the system and see if you can crash it that way - that would exclude VMware Server from the problem... Can you run the box on your bench with IDE drives and recreate the problem?

Just a few thoughts,

Lionel