Re: Reliable way to run emulated Linux under NetBSD

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On 14 August 2014 18:16, Kamil Rytarowski <n54%gmx.com@localhost> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> So nobody actually uses qemu?
> I will give a try to XEN.

I use qemu on my laptop to boot occasional WindowsXP VMs for IE6/7/8
testing (thankfully much less now than I ever did).

I have a 3Ghz i7 K875 NetBSD/amd64 6.x box running 9 CentOS VMs for QA
purposes (running a selection of Jboss java apps and one Jira). Memory
is a little tight, and running something on the dom0 which pages
heavily does quite awful things to the I/O throughput on the DOMUs
(ahem, "Then Dont Do That"), but I've been extremely happy with it.

In the three years or so its been running its saved its costs many
many times over compared to running those VMs on a cloud hoster :)

I did start with the free version of VMware Vsphere to run the Linux
VMs, but.... oh god was the I/O lousy. With four VMs up, running 'yum
update' in one VM would render the others unusable, plus the interface
was... quirky at best.