Okay, I understand a little better about what it is that you want, but I still think you're looking in the wrong direction. This is not a "goal" of virtualization. Virtualization is about server consolidation, not server configuration management. For something like that, you want a good piece of management software (like the newish Canonical project) and possibly some good scripts.
I'll step back and see if anyone else were to comment on this, and I'll pick it over in my own head and see if I know anything that fits the bill...
btw: for offline discussions on this, if you care to, my nick above on gmail usually does the trick of getting to me.
No, you just want some good scripts, this is not an application of virtualization...
Even so, I wouldn't want them to be so "close" in the cycle. I would prefer to see a manually initiated move process, even if it were scripted to be completely automatic. If you assume that everything will move on it's own, then you're inviting trouble, as it has to run at a schedule, no? Then it takes time to tar, etc.
Anyways, it sounds like you're asking for some sort of AI, or at least a few hours of good solid scripting work, and that's assuming that you had someone who was good at scripting in the first place.
Well, that's assuming that you're just using directories of scripts. If you're talking about moving live VMs around, then I think you have a flawed model still, but then at least you should be using the word snapshot for when you want a roll-back point.
Sure there's a huge market for SMBs to run one server and have multiple subs, but most people can't use the CLI in the first place to get ESXi up and running when it falls over. How many SMBs do you know that can CLI effectively?
I see where you're going, and it's more about consultancy than anything else, and I agree with you there, but I think you see my point. VMWare Server is more targeted to the SMB, and if you're smart, you'll use something like Debian (or insert favorite *nix platform here) to host the system in the first place, with X fully installed and configured (with either Gnome or KDE, makes no difference to me)
Two bits: What's your current host-os and virt platform? I use Debian Etch to run VMWare Server and host 32bit OS Win2k3 and WinXP clients. If you're worried about overhead, I would suggest doing something like this. The only caveat that I did that I wouldn't suggest to others is that I loaded X on my machine. Sure, it works a treat, but I did it for the next guy after me (who knows who or when that will be) so that they don't get overloaded by cli. Trust me, I agree it's a sad state of affairs when a sysadmin won't learn cli, but I'm not saying he or she won't, I'm just being proactive. Still, all-in-all I'm consuming less than 200MB RAM for Deb on my 16GB available, and I only make available to my guests 3.2G, so I've got a nudge to spare yet.
Other point: Why do you think EMC will overtake MS in the IT sector? Are you referring to application support? Last I checked they had one primary product line, and that's for hardware virtualization. As for other services, Apache has the market on web services, Oracle (and others) has the market on databases, and MS has the market on server O/S's, although IBM is starting to tackle that last one. So I don't understand fully your prediction about VMWare becoming the leading IT company above MS. Care to expound or clarify?
Really what you want is a virtualization client that can run on a cluster. I don't think I've seen that, but I'ld warrant that there are some R&D guys at EMC or MS working on that as you dream of it (as in, "There are no new [ideas/thoughts/dreams] under the sun").
I've thought of this myself, but the thing is, your guest o/s would have to run in ring1 at a minimum all the time, or more likely, the container would have to pseudo-execute everything, so there would be some degradation of performance.
My solution to your quest: Buy a bigger box. It'll cost about 4 times the cost of one box to double what you're specing for three boxes, but it'll consume less power, take up less space, and be more badarse in the end.
I'll put it another way. I just built a pedestal server not too long ago (first of May) for under $3000 that has RAID5, RAID1, a DVD DL burner, dual GigE, various amounts of still open slots (no multiple PCIe x16, but it's a server, not a gamer) and installed dual Quad Xeons and 16GB RAM. She's as responsive as the O/S let's her be (Debian). My point is this, the price for a midpowered desktop is around $700-$800, and anything less than that is not worth using for what you describe. So for around a little less than 4 times what you quoted, I have a machine with 8 cores that can totally rule (except for PCIe x16 graphics).
Very interesting set of points. Thanks for expounding.
I know my last post was smarmy, but I'm trying to be sincere on this one, as someone (most likely not parent_poster) will think I'm still being smarmy.
Have you tried (I'm totally ignorant on this one) dd-ing the USB and loopback mounting it?
I'ld really like to know if there is someway to get around that little hiccup. The alternative I've usually seen is that they do an alternate verify, where it uses some amalgamation of hardware IDs installed on the system XOR'ed with the HD ID (like in DOS DIR C:\ -- volume serial number).
Okay, so when I plug it in (remembering that USB and FireWire are nothing like a serial port, except that bit about sole ownership by one process when in use) how do I specify without using the console that this time VM12 gets to use the device, and next time VM01 gets the device? Provided there's no fancy scipts involved.
Sure, if you're only virt'ing one machine, then always plugging it in and having it show up on the guest is fine, but what about when you run more than one machine? I'm not going to console into ESXi and tell it to connect the FW-device to machine nnnnn and I don't think you want to either. Networked is the way to go in this situation. If you've only got one VM on the machine, then assuming it's not on the machine under your desk*, why is it not the native OS on the machine?
So's you know, I run 6 VMs on a dual quad with 16GB RAM and two HW RAID arrays, and I run VMWare Server, hosted on Debian Etch. When I want to install something on a host, I open the VMWare Server console, put in a CD, and install from here. Sure, it chews through the lan, but I can do it at night, without hurting anybody else's feelings (assuming I haven't put the iso on my iso tree in the root of the deb box). And it's nearly as fast as native-local.
*Mine isn't under my desk either, it sits off to the side. Whatever
Couple of things: VMW and VB can use the same vHDs, so unless you're talking about the snotty little text file that you can manipulate in nano faster than through the interface, that's just rather gauche to say that they don't use the same containers (I seem to recall that it's totally programmable if one person has already done it and given you their input and their performance. Sure the mechanics may be slightly different, but that's just semantics at this point when you're talking about a front end). Now when you compare native formats, sure, quite different.
As for the switching virtualization back ends, that's the whole point to VMWare's VI, duh. If they were to find a way to let you use someone else's backend and still make $10k/pop, sure, why not, but currently it's their backend that makes them money.
Yes... oh yes, I see what you did there, that was kind of funny, no? You made an oblique reference to the Cathedral and the Bazaar and the comparison to open source versus free.
I'm still confused how one company giving away a (now) free product is anywhere close to the CatB model. ESXi is still very much Cathedral, unless I missed something.
DirectX is your foe, and I too am waiting for something like this to work.
In the meantime, you really really really want to look at wine. That'll be your best bet for a quick way to do this. The only telling question is what sort of games are you wanting to switch over to WindowsXP to play in the first place? StarCraft, sure, Crysis, not.
Short answer: No, this is not an adequate replacement. Think ESXi == host-os. Can you directx from a guest? No.
At the very least, this is my so-far uninformed decision. Now, if you never have a need for directx or the like, sure, this would work. My advice, as I use either VMWareServer or VirtualBox (depending on the machine) is to stay with what you have.
Why is VMWare on the laptop a bad idea? Granted, most lappy-s don't run VT (etc) enabled CPUs, so there's not really the efficiency factor, but:
I run VMs on my laptop all the time, and know several other folks who do as well. If this lead to a faster boot time overall, then I would be all for it being on most laptops. Keep a stripped version of FX3 on a stripped speedy loader, keep your *nix distro on a second VM, and your WinXPGames machine on a third, and goto town. The only question I have is if you can still DirectX on a system booted from this...
The perfect reason to run a VM on a laptop is a LoB app need. Sure, you're not going to run PS from within a VM for extended periods of time, but I'll say this, I run VisStudio from it just fine (stupid Uni classes demanding C#... bah). I'm trying to get the office-heads to understand that if we'll just use a couple of very efficient servers, we can run nearly thinclients at each desk, that connect to a VM running on the server. You thought enterprise rollouts were easy over a network with existing hardware, think about the options to run all your workstations from one console. Too slick. I already have three or four office workers working like that, and they can't complain. They also don't have any local devices, such as scanner, but printers work fine over the network, and only a couple even use a scanner anymore.
Either you're trying to be funny (in which case I thought it was cute) or you really don't get how VMs work, eh?
If it's the second, there's a whole lot of geek-reading you need to do about sandboxed machines versus sandboxed apps, ring0 versus the other rings, and more.
Have you by chance mailed malda about that one? Either he or hemos will get it sent around to the right individual on their end if you'll just pass it along, perhaps with a screenshot of the article showing the advert...
No, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of/.'rs who want some TP that is partial to larger rears. I'm just guessing tho, not particularly for the same reason as Sir Mix-a-lot...
I've met a lot of geeks, I think that my above statement is correct...
yeah, just take these two big rocks here, and keep banging them together. I'll bring you some more rocks once that fire mountain over there get's through spewing new rocks onto the ground, and after they've cooled. Last time someone from the tribe tried to get a "new rock" too soon, and his arm fell off. He must have upset the fire mountain gods by trying to take the new rocks too soon.
For those about to downmod/enlighten me for the fact that sand != silica or whatever, chill out. He said sand, I went for sand (really small particles of ground up rocks, which everyone "knows" is sand, even though it's not necessarily the same as what's on the beach)
Honestly? It's so hard to tell sarcasm on text only forums... If you really don't get it, and want it explained, please feel free to reply.
Here's a tidbit though for those who agree with you and honestly don't get this joke (are there any such souls on/.?):
Hz is cycles per second, more or less (some will argue that this is not what Hz is - go with this) so if you had TP that moved back and forth at five times per second, what would that mean for you? If you then underclocked it by a factor of ten, you would get a half a stroke per second, which is a little more suitable for the purpose of TP.
Okay, now that I feel like an arse for explaining a joke on/., I hope I didn't really fall for one of the lesser known classic blunders... Queue Wallace Shawn (aka Vizzinni for those who don't know... losers) jokes here: 5 4 3 2
No no no As N approaches the actual voter, his respective vote appears to diminish to 0.
Now we have to ask if accepting a vote is even important in a popular election anymore, or are the reported figures just being generated with an abacus and a shaker table? (Hint for the imaginationally impaired, shake an abacus on a flat surface and then read it. It should always change to some degree)
No, I'm forgetting that these are the people who can't use an abacus in the first place.
As far as C:\Program Files\Common Files there's a lot of crufty stuff, if you're looking to slim the disk space. If you're looking for lowest overhead, then you can muck about in there, but disk is not usually at a premium anymore (unless you're trying to hit a USB disk size).
Actually, I had to run the disk space up to 5GB instead of the 4.4 that I would have preferred so that I could back up the VM to a DVD. Though I doubt that there is 600 MB that I could throw away.
There's always things to be thrown away. Look for anything that starts with a $ under C:\Windows for starters, but don't just delete willy-nilly. Know why you're deleting. That usually helps.:D Okay, I gotta say that last part.
Two places where you can make some substantial disk space available at the expense of all else is to make sure you never enable hibernation and to reduce the page file to the minimum that gives you the performance you need. If you're going for size, set it for either 0 (I don't think it allows this) or like 2 MB. Also, make sure you turn off all indexing crap, etc. I do that before I start doing anything.
As this is a virtual machine, I hibernate it instead of shutting down. Care to elaborate, as there doesn't seem to be much on the web explaining this. Also, isn't the paging file similar to/swap? For Solidworks (CAD) I don't think that I should reduce it. So hibernation: the VM programs can hibernate the disk for you in the same manner as the way that Windows does, it's just that the RAM dump file is written outside the native O/S rather than in. On Linux, I find this usually gives me a faster Windows load, but just barely. It's not really noticeable if you're starting the VM and then doing something else, then returning after a moment or two. So page file: Windows is different from Linux in that on Windows, if you read from disk, you both page it and write it to RAM (well, there's some contention here, but I'm not an NTKRNL coder, and I don't know anyone who is, so I'm going from what I've witnessed to be happening). The reason for the page is that Windows tends to overread, and it knows exactly where the data will be in RAM, so it can pop over and read from the contiguous area that is the PF. The main thing the swap or page does in either O/S is always to speed ops, so I would try running the software without the PF enabled (or enabled to the mins) and see how performance works for you.
Lastly, once you have Windows (not with apps, just barebones) where you want it, defrag until the lines quit moving. Then you can install your apps.
Silly question: Do virtual machines need to be defragged as well? Isn't the fragmentation handled by the filesystem? Though, Windows does _think_ that it's on a FAT filesystem.
A FS is a FS is a FS. Something that a lot of people seem to forget is that the guest O/S thinks it's running on native hw, and the only way that Windows can tell that it's not, is that the driver names start with VMWare or the like (trust me, Windows has no way to magically probe and tell that there's not a chip underneath something). Therefore, treat the VM just like you would treat any desktop. Defrag, AV, everything the same. If you don't, you're screwing yourself. The reason I say to defrag is that it will natch optimize the FS. And if you're running FAT, I hope you mean FAT32, as FAT gives lesser performance (well, that's unqualified. For a smaller FS, then FAT may give just the performance you need).
For something small and portable without MS Vis Studio, I do something like a 5GB vHD, depending on my mood when I create it. Sometimes I'll do 4. XP needs a miminum of 2 to do anything useful, and 4 is kind of cutting it. No bigger than 8, unless you either do a lot of rendering (temp files) or if you are into that whole sado-mas thing. Anything over 8 (talking in round numbers, not percents or fract
Isn't that always the case, how we have time for/. and naught else...
As far as C:\Program Files\Common Files there's a lot of crufty stuff, if you're looking to slim the disk space. If you're looking for lowest overhead, then you can muck about in there, but disk is not usually at a premium anymore (unless you're trying to hit a USB disk size).
Two places where you can make some substantial disk space available at the expense of all else is to make sure you never enable hibernation and to reduce the page file to the minimum that gives you the performance you need. If you're going for size, set it for either 0 (I don't think it allows this) or like 2 MB. Also, make sure you turn off all indexing crap, etc. I do that before I start doing anything.
Lastly, once you have Windows (not with apps, just barebones) where you want it, defrag until the lines quit moving. Then you can install your apps.
For something small and portable without MS Vis Studio, I do something like a 5GB vHD, depending on my mood when I create it. Sometimes I'll do 4. XP needs a miminum of 2 to do anything useful, and 4 is kind of cutting it. No bigger than 8, unless you either do a lot of rendering (temp files) or if you are into that whole sado-mas thing. Anything over 8 (talking in round numbers, not percents or fractions) cannot be reasonably burned to a DVD without compression, and that'll suxors big time if you run into that problem. Also, you'll have to wait a while transferring over the network (assuming brick level backup of the whole vHD on occasion to another box) if you don't have GigE all the way around, so the smaller the disk size the better.
There are guys out there who will slim an install till they can't remove another file without disrupting Windows Core functionality. I'll offer this if you get hooked on slimming. IE and Explorer share the same core, and that core is the same core that the rest of the system uses for the APIs. So the Save As... dialog is the same all the way through (interesting note, this is part of why they could never say they had removed IE from the system after a certain point. Because of these shared libs. That would be like saying Gnome is only gone if you don't have any GTK libs on your system, or whatever).
So, hope that helps, and I'm usually available over gmail, and I love this sort of thing. To me, slimming is the ME of CS, so there you have it.
Last note before I jet for the evening. Yoda am I not, hmmm. Yoda, meet soon enough, you will.
How long ago did you learn to muck about in the registry, read *.inf's, etc?
How well do you know %system_dir% (C:\Windows\System32) or %windows_dir% or your individual profile?
Do you know what you those files in C:\Program Files\Common Files do?
These are the sorts of questions that you have to start considering depending on what you're doing, but you'll notice I'm right at the border of what's going into XP versus what goes into XP Embedded. I would start with Black Viper, then the Windows Powertoys has one good utility, then you have some other things to think about, regarding disk space and performance, etc. Feel free to contact me at my nick @ google mail to see if I can't help you really stream it down. An AMD/ATI HW thread doesn't seem like the right place to do a VM load trim session...
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Okay, I understand a little better about what it is that you want, but I still think you're looking in the wrong direction. This is not a "goal" of virtualization. Virtualization is about server consolidation, not server configuration management. For something like that, you want a good piece of management software (like the newish Canonical project) and possibly some good scripts.
I'll step back and see if anyone else were to comment on this, and I'll pick it over in my own head and see if I know anything that fits the bill...
btw: for offline discussions on this, if you care to, my nick above on gmail usually does the trick of getting to me.
No, you just want some good scripts, this is not an application of virtualization...
Even so, I wouldn't want them to be so "close" in the cycle. I would prefer to see a manually initiated move process, even if it were scripted to be completely automatic. If you assume that everything will move on it's own, then you're inviting trouble, as it has to run at a schedule, no? Then it takes time to tar, etc.
Anyways, it sounds like you're asking for some sort of AI, or at least a few hours of good solid scripting work, and that's assuming that you had someone who was good at scripting in the first place.
Well, that's assuming that you're just using directories of scripts. If you're talking about moving live VMs around, then I think you have a flawed model still, but then at least you should be using the word snapshot for when you want a roll-back point.
Sure there's a huge market for SMBs to run one server and have multiple subs, but most people can't use the CLI in the first place to get ESXi up and running when it falls over. How many SMBs do you know that can CLI effectively?
I see where you're going, and it's more about consultancy than anything else, and I agree with you there, but I think you see my point. VMWare Server is more targeted to the SMB, and if you're smart, you'll use something like Debian (or insert favorite *nix platform here) to host the system in the first place, with X fully installed and configured (with either Gnome or KDE, makes no difference to me)
Two bits: What's your current host-os and virt platform? I use Debian Etch to run VMWare Server and host 32bit OS Win2k3 and WinXP clients. If you're worried about overhead, I would suggest doing something like this. The only caveat that I did that I wouldn't suggest to others is that I loaded X on my machine. Sure, it works a treat, but I did it for the next guy after me (who knows who or when that will be) so that they don't get overloaded by cli. Trust me, I agree it's a sad state of affairs when a sysadmin won't learn cli, but I'm not saying he or she won't, I'm just being proactive. Still, all-in-all I'm consuming less than 200MB RAM for Deb on my 16GB available, and I only make available to my guests 3.2G, so I've got a nudge to spare yet.
Other point: Why do you think EMC will overtake MS in the IT sector? Are you referring to application support? Last I checked they had one primary product line, and that's for hardware virtualization. As for other services, Apache has the market on web services, Oracle (and others) has the market on databases, and MS has the market on server O/S's, although IBM is starting to tackle that last one. So I don't understand fully your prediction about VMWare becoming the leading IT company above MS. Care to expound or clarify?
Really what you want is a virtualization client that can run on a cluster. I don't think I've seen that, but I'ld warrant that there are some R&D guys at EMC or MS working on that as you dream of it (as in, "There are no new [ideas/thoughts/dreams] under the sun").
I've thought of this myself, but the thing is, your guest o/s would have to run in ring1 at a minimum all the time, or more likely, the container would have to pseudo-execute everything, so there would be some degradation of performance.
My solution to your quest: Buy a bigger box. It'll cost about 4 times the cost of one box to double what you're specing for three boxes, but it'll consume less power, take up less space, and be more badarse in the end.
I'll put it another way. I just built a pedestal server not too long ago (first of May) for under $3000 that has RAID5, RAID1, a DVD DL burner, dual GigE, various amounts of still open slots (no multiple PCIe x16, but it's a server, not a gamer) and installed dual Quad Xeons and 16GB RAM. She's as responsive as the O/S let's her be (Debian). My point is this, the price for a midpowered desktop is around $700-$800, and anything less than that is not worth using for what you describe. So for around a little less than 4 times what you quoted, I have a machine with 8 cores that can totally rule (except for PCIe x16 graphics).
Very interesting set of points. Thanks for expounding.
I know my last post was smarmy, but I'm trying to be sincere on this one, as someone (most likely not parent_poster) will think I'm still being smarmy.
Have you tried (I'm totally ignorant on this one) dd-ing the USB and loopback mounting it?
I'ld really like to know if there is someway to get around that little hiccup. The alternative I've usually seen is that they do an alternate verify, where it uses some amalgamation of hardware IDs installed on the system XOR'ed with the HD ID (like in DOS DIR C:\ -- volume serial number).
Okay, so when I plug it in (remembering that USB and FireWire are nothing like a serial port, except that bit about sole ownership by one process when in use) how do I specify without using the console that this time VM12 gets to use the device, and next time VM01 gets the device? Provided there's no fancy scipts involved.
Sure, if you're only virt'ing one machine, then always plugging it in and having it show up on the guest is fine, but what about when you run more than one machine? I'm not going to console into ESXi and tell it to connect the FW-device to machine nnnnn and I don't think you want to either. Networked is the way to go in this situation. If you've only got one VM on the machine, then assuming it's not on the machine under your desk*, why is it not the native OS on the machine?
So's you know, I run 6 VMs on a dual quad with 16GB RAM and two HW RAID arrays, and I run VMWare Server, hosted on Debian Etch. When I want to install something on a host, I open the VMWare Server console, put in a CD, and install from here. Sure, it chews through the lan, but I can do it at night, without hurting anybody else's feelings (assuming I haven't put the iso on my iso tree in the root of the deb box). And it's nearly as fast as native-local.
*Mine isn't under my desk either, it sits off to the side. Whatever
Couple of things:
VMW and VB can use the same vHDs, so unless you're talking about the snotty little text file that you can manipulate in nano faster than through the interface, that's just rather gauche to say that they don't use the same containers (I seem to recall that it's totally programmable if one person has already done it and given you their input and their performance. Sure the mechanics may be slightly different, but that's just semantics at this point when you're talking about a front end). Now when you compare native formats, sure, quite different.
As for the switching virtualization back ends, that's the whole point to VMWare's VI, duh. If they were to find a way to let you use someone else's backend and still make $10k/pop, sure, why not, but currently it's their backend that makes them money.
Yes ... oh yes, I see what you did there, that was kind of funny, no? You made an oblique reference to the Cathedral and the Bazaar and the comparison to open source versus free.
I'm still confused how one company giving away a (now) free product is anywhere close to the CatB model. ESXi is still very much Cathedral, unless I missed something.
DirectX is your foe, and I too am waiting for something like this to work.
In the meantime, you really really really want to look at wine. That'll be your best bet for a quick way to do this. The only telling question is what sort of games are you wanting to switch over to WindowsXP to play in the first place? StarCraft, sure, Crysis, not.
Short answer: No, this is not an adequate replacement. Think ESXi == host-os. Can you directx from a guest? No.
At the very least, this is my so-far uninformed decision. Now, if you never have a need for directx or the like, sure, this would work. My advice, as I use either VMWareServer or VirtualBox (depending on the machine) is to stay with what you have.
Why is VMWare on the laptop a bad idea? Granted, most lappy-s don't run VT (etc) enabled CPUs, so there's not really the efficiency factor, but:
I run VMs on my laptop all the time, and know several other folks who do as well. If this lead to a faster boot time overall, then I would be all for it being on most laptops. Keep a stripped version of FX3 on a stripped speedy loader, keep your *nix distro on a second VM, and your WinXPGames machine on a third, and goto town. The only question I have is if you can still DirectX on a system booted from this...
The perfect reason to run a VM on a laptop is a LoB app need. Sure, you're not going to run PS from within a VM for extended periods of time, but I'll say this, I run VisStudio from it just fine (stupid Uni classes demanding C# ... bah). I'm trying to get the office-heads to understand that if we'll just use a couple of very efficient servers, we can run nearly thinclients at each desk, that connect to a VM running on the server. You thought enterprise rollouts were easy over a network with existing hardware, think about the options to run all your workstations from one console. Too slick. I already have three or four office workers working like that, and they can't complain. They also don't have any local devices, such as scanner, but printers work fine over the network, and only a couple even use a scanner anymore.
Either you're trying to be funny (in which case I thought it was cute) or you really don't get how VMs work, eh?
If it's the second, there's a whole lot of geek-reading you need to do about sandboxed machines versus sandboxed apps, ring0 versus the other rings, and more.
Have you by chance mailed malda about that one? Either he or hemos will get it sent around to the right individual on their end if you'll just pass it along, perhaps with a screenshot of the article showing the advert...
No, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of /.'rs who want some TP that is partial to larger rears. I'm just guessing tho, not particularly for the same reason as Sir Mix-a-lot...
I've met a lot of geeks, I think that my above statement is correct...
yeah, just take these two big rocks here, and keep banging them together. I'll bring you some more rocks once that fire mountain over there get's through spewing new rocks onto the ground, and after they've cooled. Last time someone from the tribe tried to get a "new rock" too soon, and his arm fell off. He must have upset the fire mountain gods by trying to take the new rocks too soon.
For those about to downmod/enlighten me for the fact that sand != silica or whatever, chill out. He said sand, I went for sand (really small particles of ground up rocks, which everyone "knows" is sand, even though it's not necessarily the same as what's on the beach)
Unfortunately this was my first thought too
Honestly? It's so hard to tell sarcasm on text only forums... If you really don't get it, and want it explained, please feel free to reply.
Here's a tidbit though for those who agree with you and honestly don't get this joke (are there any such souls on /.?):
Hz is cycles per second, more or less (some will argue that this is not what Hz is - go with this) so if you had TP that moved back and forth at five times per second, what would that mean for you? If you then underclocked it by a factor of ten, you would get a half a stroke per second, which is a little more suitable for the purpose of TP.
Okay, now that I feel like an arse for explaining a joke on /., I hope I didn't really fall for one of the lesser known classic blunders... Queue Wallace Shawn (aka Vizzinni for those who don't know ... losers) jokes here: 5 4 3 2
No no no
As N approaches the actual voter, his respective vote appears to diminish to 0.
Now we have to ask if accepting a vote is even important in a popular election anymore, or are the reported figures just being generated with an abacus and a shaker table? (Hint for the imaginationally impaired, shake an abacus on a flat surface and then read it. It should always change to some degree)
No, I'm forgetting that these are the people who can't use an abacus in the first place.
I am /me and I approve this message
iNTERNET, just as the e on so much stands for eLECTRONIC
I realize this is a backwards capitalization strategy, it was done on purpose.
As far as C:\Program Files\Common Files there's a lot of crufty stuff, if you're looking to slim the disk space. If you're looking for lowest overhead, then you can muck about in there, but disk is not usually at a premium anymore (unless you're trying to hit a USB disk size).
Actually, I had to run the disk space up to 5GB instead of the 4.4 that I would have preferred so that I could back up the VM to a DVD. Though I doubt that there is 600 MB that I could throw away.
There's always things to be thrown away. Look for anything that starts with a $ under C:\Windows for starters, but don't just delete willy-nilly. Know why you're deleting. That usually helps. :D Okay, I gotta say that last part.
Two places where you can make some substantial disk space available at the expense of all else is to make sure you never enable hibernation and to reduce the page file to the minimum that gives you the performance you need. If you're going for size, set it for either 0 (I don't think it allows this) or like 2 MB. Also, make sure you turn off all indexing crap, etc. I do that before I start doing anything.
As this is a virtual machine, I hibernate it instead of shutting down. Care to elaborate, as there doesn't seem to be much on the web explaining this. Also, isn't the paging file similar to /swap? For Solidworks (CAD) I don't think that I should reduce it. So hibernation: the VM programs can hibernate the disk for you in the same manner as the way that Windows does, it's just that the RAM dump file is written outside the native O/S rather than in. On Linux, I find this usually gives me a faster Windows load, but just barely. It's not really noticeable if you're starting the VM and then doing something else, then returning after a moment or two.
So page file: Windows is different from Linux in that on Windows, if you read from disk, you both page it and write it to RAM (well, there's some contention here, but I'm not an NTKRNL coder, and I don't know anyone who is, so I'm going from what I've witnessed to be happening). The reason for the page is that Windows tends to overread, and it knows exactly where the data will be in RAM, so it can pop over and read from the contiguous area that is the PF. The main thing the swap or page does in either O/S is always to speed ops, so I would try running the software without the PF enabled (or enabled to the mins) and see how performance works for you.
Lastly, once you have Windows (not with apps, just barebones) where you want it, defrag until the lines quit moving. Then you can install your apps.
Silly question: Do virtual machines need to be defragged as well? Isn't the fragmentation handled by the filesystem? Though, Windows does _think_ that it's on a FAT filesystem.
A FS is a FS is a FS. Something that a lot of people seem to forget is that the guest O/S thinks it's running on native hw, and the only way that Windows can tell that it's not, is that the driver names start with VMWare or the like (trust me, Windows has no way to magically probe and tell that there's not a chip underneath something). Therefore, treat the VM just like you would treat any desktop. Defrag, AV, everything the same. If you don't, you're screwing yourself. The reason I say to defrag is that it will natch optimize the FS. And if you're running FAT, I hope you mean FAT32, as FAT gives lesser performance (well, that's unqualified. For a smaller FS, then FAT may give just the performance you need).
For something small and portable without MS Vis Studio, I do something like a 5GB vHD, depending on my mood when I create it. Sometimes I'll do 4. XP needs a miminum of 2 to do anything useful, and 4 is kind of cutting it. No bigger than 8, unless you either do a lot of rendering (temp files) or if you are into that whole sado-mas thing. Anything over 8 (talking in round numbers, not percents or fract
Isn't that always the case, how we have time for /. and naught else...
As far as C:\Program Files\Common Files there's a lot of crufty stuff, if you're looking to slim the disk space. If you're looking for lowest overhead, then you can muck about in there, but disk is not usually at a premium anymore (unless you're trying to hit a USB disk size).
Two places where you can make some substantial disk space available at the expense of all else is to make sure you never enable hibernation and to reduce the page file to the minimum that gives you the performance you need. If you're going for size, set it for either 0 (I don't think it allows this) or like 2 MB. Also, make sure you turn off all indexing crap, etc. I do that before I start doing anything.
Lastly, once you have Windows (not with apps, just barebones) where you want it, defrag until the lines quit moving. Then you can install your apps.
For something small and portable without MS Vis Studio, I do something like a 5GB vHD, depending on my mood when I create it. Sometimes I'll do 4. XP needs a miminum of 2 to do anything useful, and 4 is kind of cutting it. No bigger than 8, unless you either do a lot of rendering (temp files) or if you are into that whole sado-mas thing. Anything over 8 (talking in round numbers, not percents or fractions) cannot be reasonably burned to a DVD without compression, and that'll suxors big time if you run into that problem. Also, you'll have to wait a while transferring over the network (assuming brick level backup of the whole vHD on occasion to another box) if you don't have GigE all the way around, so the smaller the disk size the better.
There are guys out there who will slim an install till they can't remove another file without disrupting Windows Core functionality. I'll offer this if you get hooked on slimming. IE and Explorer share the same core, and that core is the same core that the rest of the system uses for the APIs. So the Save As... dialog is the same all the way through (interesting note, this is part of why they could never say they had removed IE from the system after a certain point. Because of these shared libs. That would be like saying Gnome is only gone if you don't have any GTK libs on your system, or whatever).
So, hope that helps, and I'm usually available over gmail, and I love this sort of thing. To me, slimming is the ME of CS, so there you have it.
Last note before I jet for the evening. Yoda am I not, hmmm. Yoda, meet soon enough, you will.
Have you started at Black Viper?
How long ago did you learn to muck about in the registry, read *.inf's, etc?
How well do you know %system_dir% (C:\Windows\System32) or %windows_dir% or your individual profile?
Do you know what you those files in C:\Program Files\Common Files do?
These are the sorts of questions that you have to start considering depending on what you're doing, but you'll notice I'm right at the border of what's going into XP versus what goes into XP Embedded. I would start with Black Viper, then the Windows Powertoys has one good utility, then you have some other things to think about, regarding disk space and performance, etc. Feel free to contact me at my nick @ google mail to see if I can't help you really stream it down. An AMD/ATI HW thread doesn't seem like the right place to do a VM load trim session...
Not the algorithm, the implementation on the chip. Chip designers get really touchy about those sorts of things...