Using Ubuntu 64 bit server

[Larry Alkoff]

Jordon Bedwell wrote:
> On 10/18/2010 08:35 PM, Christopher Chan wrote:
>> I have a server that has 16G of RAM too where I will be running multiple 
>> Windows servers. Oh, the motherboard does not determine whether things 
>> are 64-bit or not. The server I use has two AMD Opterons supplying 
>> 24-cores in total, two SAS2 host controllers and will eventually have 36 
>> disks connected (right now there are only 12, two as system disks, 10 in 
>> a raidz2 array with one as a spare) and a dual-port Intel gbit nic 
>> onboard and an addon 4 port intel gbit nic.
> 
> Go buy a 64GB quad X7550 or higher hypervisor.  I have more ram in my
> personal workstations :P (My personal baby has 24GB of RAM right now).
> I always preferred network storage though, I assume you don't experience
> much possible downtime from rundown >.>

You can buy a hypervisor?  What is a '64GB quad X7550 or higher 
hypervisor'.  You talking about a motherboard or software?

>> Ah...is there a paravirtualized graphic driver for Windows under KVM 
>> available yet? No? Ah shucks.
> 
> Yes, there are.  They are provided by VMWare.  Also, you forget about
> Hardware assisted [Native] virtualisation in this statement.
I'll go to VMWare if KVM is unsatisfactory.


>> /me stares. Let us know if you get that working Larry. :-D
> 
> People have.  I have to, using the same methods.
> 
>> KVM is stable when I tried it on Hardy...just don't expect any 
>> speed/smooth video playback. Xen on the other hand...is a very intrusive 
>> solution compared to KVM. Never found it stable even with Linux guests.
> 
> Subjective.  KVM is in the Kernel.  Xen and VMWare are not.  Both Xen
> and VMWare were rejected from the Kernel until Xen and VMWare came
> together and made Paravirt-OPS, AKA KVM.  Redhat and others were
> involved in this too.  So much for "intrusive" right, since in the end
> it is still Xen and VMWare ;)
> 
> On the subject of Xen being unstable, that is subjective too, stability
> in Xen comes with experience and knowledge.  You can't call it unstable
> when it runs the worlds 5 biggest clouds.
> 
>>>> 3.  How does the 64 bit server handle 32 bit code?
>>>>         If by thunking, is there any speed degradation?
> 
>>> No idea, unfortunately...  I want to say that there is some thunking
>>> that occurs, but honestly, that's too far into dark kernel magic
>>> territory for me to give you a reliable answer.
> 
> This isn't elaborated enough.  You need to ultimately drill down the
> type of virtualisation, out of the 3.  Full virtualisation (Parallels,
> OpenVZ [Parallels still], Paravirtualisation [Paravirt-OPS, Xen,
> Parallels, OpenVZ, VMWare] or Hardware assisted virtualisation [Xen,
> VMWare, Paravirt-OPS].  If you are talking about running 32bit binaries
> on 64bit systems, that of course needs to be elaborated too, because
> Debian implements it different than Redhat.  Everything has a overhead
> but it's all defined by scenario.
> 
>> KVM must have hardware virtualization available as it is hardware 
>> virtualization module but it does support paravirtualize stuff like disk 
>> and nic i/o via virtio.
> 
> You can also run Qemu/KVM without hardware support as well.  As stated
> by Redhat: "You can still use QEMU/KVM, but the emulator will fall back
> to software virtualization, which is FAR FAR slower."
> 
>> If Larry has enough throughput, virtio should help plenty. I have got 
>> very decent disk performance under KVM with virtio for Windows. No 
>> virtio then yes, forget it. It will crawl.
> 
> This is obviously subjective and scenario based.  Lets get some real
> scenarios please, I mean some REAL scenarios.  Dude brought up SAN but
> did not mention it's implementation.  You mentioned virtio would help
> which was pretty irrelevant because we don't have a scneario. So can get
> a real damn scenario please?
> 
>> You could at least verify all your bits of knowledge before passing them on.
> 
> So could you...
> 

I hope my system is powerful enough to do the job.
It is a 64 bit Gigabyte X58-USB3 motherboard (very will constructed in 
my opinion) with 12 gB of DDR3 ram and an Intel socket LGA1366 cpu at a 
freq of 3.06 Ghz (seems spectacularly fast to me) and Core i7-950 
processor.  Just brought it alive for the first time last night.
It will use Ubuntu server 10.10.1 64 bit. Now I have to learn much more 
about virtualization so I can start with with Kubuntu 10.10.x desktop.
Do I have enough horsepower?

Larry Alkoff