virtualbox tips for performance specific to FreeBSD-10 hosts

[John]

Hi, thanks for replying.

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 09:39:34AM +0100, Bernhard Fr?hlich wrote:

> I would not recommend using VirtualBox on such a box. VirtualBox is a Desktop
> Virtualisation product and that specs are too high to make good use of them.
> 
> One issue you will run into is ZFS ARC - with that amount of memory it will take
> quite some time to fill up but ZFS ARC and VirtualBox wired memory will start
> fighting each other. So I recommend limiting ZFS ARC to some sane amount.
> (32GB?)
> 
> VirtualBox has quite a bit more overhead than all the other server
> grade virtualisation
> products out there and that is especially true for I/O. With FreeBSD
> 10 you should
> already use AHCI on the host and the linux guests will likely use an
> SATA controller
> and AHCI too. That should be the minimum and is also what we have already
> written down in the vbox tuning notes:
> 
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/VirtualBox/Tuning

I had looked at that. I was looking for some tunable on the linux VMs as
well. Like I said, performance so far has been OK but I see what you
mean by VB being really aimed at desktops. That's the impression I got,
too. The running out of ARC is a worry because some of these VMs will be
doing (eventually) heavy SQL work. The VMs I have on there at the moment aren't
taxing the hardware at all, yet. Probably due to there being only two
running on there presently.

I think I'll have to familiarise myself with bhyve. Steep learning
curve!

thanks,

-- 
John