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!
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!