I use a Gentoo VM for a lot of LAMP dev work, and I can tell you it's kind of painful to upgrade packages with all the compiling. VMWare is slower than normal to compile, mostly due to disk I/O. Since each HD is a big-ass file.
A few optimizations I might suggest: Partition a dedicated physical hard drive into chunks and use VMWare's "raw" disk so you have real hardware/hard disks. I'd suggest a very fast SCSI drive for the best performance since you're running several VMs. Also, look into the VMWare server version which uses the raw iron a bit better as it's dedicated to running many VMs. I find that more RAM on VMWare has a point of deminishing returns. I have a VM that I dedicate 512MB of my 2GBs and honestly it feels slower than when I give it 128-256MB only. It may be a WinXP thing that it's not efficiently using the RAM right or something. > -----Original Message----- > From: Trenton Adams [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Sunday, November 05, 2006 9:19 PM > To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org > Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Mini Gentoo in VMWare > > Yes, VMWare is fit for the task, simply because I would be using it on > a windows machine. Unless there is something better for a windows > machine? > > Thanks for the hints. > > On 11/3/06, Harm Geerts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Friday 03 November 2006 06:43, Trenton Adams wrote: > > > Hi Guys, > > > > > > Has anyone here played with minimalizing everything for > use in vmware? > > > > > > Basically what I want to do is create a series of VERY > tiny VMs that > > > are all independent of each other, which provide one service. For > > > instance, I might put apache on one VM, and tomcat on > another, and so > > > on. Obviously, I would want their memory usage to be absolutely > > > minimized, seeing that I would like to run them all on > one computer. > > > I would probably provide them 64M-128M of RAM each, for > their specific > > > service. Perhaps a little more if really required. > > > > > > Is there really anything that I should worry about? > Perhaps I should > > > just DO IT? > > > > Nick[1] made a post about minimizing Gentoo a while back. > > But that topic was mainly about the disk usage. > > I suppose you would benefit from a system that uses the -Os > flag to create > > small binairies. > > > > But do you think vmware is fit for such a task? > > vmware is a big strain on resources itself. > > You might want to have a look at xen[2] instead. > > > > [1] > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/160899/focus=160903 > > [2] http://www.xensource.com/xen/xen/index.html > > -- > > gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list > > > > > -- > gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list > > -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
