We use VMWare ESX on a cluster of HP blade servers, and Firebird is running on a
few VM's.

One VM has 4 CPU's (On an 8-core blade), running classic.

The other VM has a single CPU (also on an 8-core blade), running superserver.

Firebird can't see the underlying physical CPU's, and is bound by the operating
system running as the guest OS (In this case, both are running 2008 server
64-bit).

One interesting side issue - The Quad-core VM is running SQLServer 2005 and
Firebird Classic.
SQLServer is used as the on-line application (a limitation of the software that
required it).

For reporting, we replicate the data out to Firebird, and it does the crunching
to produce the reports.

If the supplier would release the sources, I'd swing it entirely over the Firebird!

Nige.

>> Alan McDonald wrote:
>> ...
>> > I understand VMware can nominate single or multi core use.
>> > Not sure if a declaration of single core use in VMWare is
>> > transparent to Firebird since the VMWare may still broker
>> > requests for CPU time to any of the 4 cores depending on
>> > load.
>>
>> I've only used virtual machines over VMware Workstation and
>> Server editions - but I imagine the ESX edition should be
>> much the same, just faster (less overhead).
>>
>> The number of CPUs declared for the VM is what Firebird will
>> see - if you host has that many. (eg: I am running a quad-
>> core hardware in front of me and the entire virtual OS sees
>> just the one processor that was specified for the VM... and
>> when I specify a second it sees two processors. The system
>> info reports the correct Intel identifier for the quad-core
>> but it does not seem to see more cores/processors than the
>> VM tells it to.)
>>
>> See this unanswered thread of mine that shows some performance
>> comparisons (not related to Firebird specifically but you
>> should get the idea) running over VMware Workstation v6.5:
>>
>> http://communities.vmware.com/thread/205351
>>
>>
>> > Does anyone have experience here as to whether I can stick
>> > with SuperServer (which is what it is at this time) or if
>> > I need to switch to Classic to make best use of the FB
>> > service. If the FB super sees thru the VMware core
>> > switching, this may be to the detriment of performance.
>>
>> As far as my own experience goes the rules for Firebird remain
>> unchanged. What the VM gives it is what it will see, so
>> Classic may be better for multiple CPU, Super for single CPU.
>>
>>
>> One of the things highlighted with the performance testing I
>> did was just how much CPU can be taken up by the VM in dealing
>> with disk and network access. I would be curious to see
>> similar stats from ESX.
>>
>> --
>> Geoff Worboys
>> Telesis Computing
>
> thanks Geoff, A bit of reading there. My client has been collecting stats
> for a few months now. They've moved about 80 servers in now but my first
> move will be with a relatively low load server, so no doubt I will be
> watching carefully.
> Alan
>
>

--
Nigel Weeks

Prism9 Technology
e: nweeks@...
m: 0408 133 738
w:http://prism9.com

fb:http://facebook.com/profile.php?id=604592926