[OpenAFS] Deploying OpenAFS on VMs

[Jan Johansson]

Harald Barth <haba@kth.se> wrote:
> If I recall correctly: su.se virtualized all their AFS servers,
> discovered that preformance was crap under concurrent loads and
> unvirtualized them again.

We started to virtualize all our AFS servers with FreeBSD 5.x in
an ESX 3.5. We used Raw Device Mappings which sometimes the
FreeBSD would just drop so we switched to .wmdk.

Somewhere we started converting to Unbutu Hardy and later to
Ubuntu Lucid. Somewhere along the line we noticed that we had
very poor filesystem performance in all guests. No real debugging
was done and bought physical servers.

Later we bought new ESX clusters running vSphere and today have
four ReadOnly servers that performs well enough.
(Still running on .vmdk).

Here is a "dd if=/dev/zero of=testfie bs=1M count=1024"
comparison all done on Ubuntu Lucid use your judgement
if it says anything at all:

Physical Dell R710 RAID 5:
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 6.94223 s, 155 MB/s

Virtual vSphere:
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 11.5887 s, 92.7 MB/s

Virtual ESX 3.5:
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 11.1295 s, 96.5 MB/s

I don't remember what the FreeBSD had but I think it was about
half of the Ubuntu.