Windows 2003 Guest best practices

twocell

Member
May 12, 2010
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What are the best practices for a Windows 2003 guest?

I've been googling for a while now and found a lot of contradictory information. Please give me your opinion and the benefit of your experience. Of course one of the great things about Windows 2003 is that once you activate your license you can't experiment with too many hardware changes or you'll have too reactivate, so having some kind of a best practices doc on the wiki would really be helpful.

I'm working on the following questions:

* Number of virtual CPU's. Multicore?

* Disk settings: Format & Bus?

I've read that raw gives the best perfomance, but qcow2 has it's advantages: copy on write, snapshots and so forth. As far as bus goes is Virtio ready for production? The KVM website recomends virtio and raw for performance.

* NIC: e1000 vs Virtio. I'm leaning tawards e1000 even though I'm annoyed that I've only found the driver in an .exe format.

* Hard disk caching. Under disk properties in Windows 2003 you can turn off the disk cache (Windows caches writes in ram). KVM enables it's own writethough caching which relies on the Debian hosts caching (I think). Plus modern disks have a sizable hardware cache. Do we really need all this chained redundant caching?

If you have any suggestions or best practices please lay em out in this thread. I'd like to work up a document for the wiki.

Thanks!
 
What are the best practices for a Windows 2003 guest?

I've been googling for a while now and found a lot of contradictory information. Please give me your opinion and the benefit of your experience. Of course one of the great things about Windows 2003 is that once you activate your license you can't experiment with too many hardware changes or you'll have too reactivate, so having some kind of a best practices doc on the wiki would really be helpful.

I'm working on the following questions:

* Number of virtual CPU's. Multicore?
with more than 1 is the only different between Multicore and number of CPU Licensing - so you can use 1 CPU with 8 Cores also with WinXP, but no 8 CPUs.
I made the experience, that the IO don't always perform good with more than one CPU (i made no tests with the actual pvetest (kvm0.12.5) perhaps there are improvments).
* Disk settings: Format & Bus?

I've read that raw gives the best perfomance, but qcow2 has it's advantages: copy on write, snapshots and so forth. As far as bus goes is Virtio ready for production? The KVM website recomends virtio and raw for performance.
For good performance i use virtio with raw (i use allways raw); for "normal" performance and up to three disks i use ide.
* NIC: e1000 vs Virtio. I'm leaning tawards e1000 even though I'm annoyed that I've only found the driver in an .exe format.
Due to some issues with the virtio-driver (network lost under heavy network load) app. one year ago i use only the e1000-driver
* Hard disk caching. Under disk properties in Windows 2003 you can turn off the disk cache (Windows caches writes in ram). KVM enables it's own writethough caching which relies on the Debian hosts caching (I think). Plus modern disks have a sizable hardware cache. Do we really need all this chained redundant caching?
in production i don't use special cache-parameter - but perhaps i should?!

BTW. most of my VMs are Linux - some WinXP and only one Win2003 (in production) on Proxmox. Therefor other people have more knowlegde about this!

Udo
 

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