Blade server progress report

[Siju George]

Hi Matt,

1. Which Linux distro did you install?
2. Is there any move to support KVM  ( host ) in Dragonfly in the near future?

Thanks

Siju

On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 11:42 AM, Matthew Dillon
<dillon at apollo.backplane.com> wrote:
>     We received our blade server.  It isn't installed in the colo facility
>     yet but that will hopefully happen in the next week or two.  Right now
>     we are moving services from the discrete machines to the blades.
>
>     These haswell blades are blasted fast and will idle down to 18W each.
>     I am very impressed.
>
>     We had some fun with pkgbox32.  Since pkgbox32 is running 32-bit it
>     would have been a waste to dedicate a 16GB blade to it, so we actually
>     installed linux on that particular blade and we are running the
>     DragonFly pkgbox32 as a qemu KVM instance (with virtio no-less).
>     Now, of course, the Haswell xeon is two generations ahead of the Phenom II
>     that the old pkgbox32 was running on.  But still, both are clocked at
>     3.4 GHz and I set ncpus to 4 in the VM to match the Phenom II, then
>     ran a buildworld -j 8 test.  The qemu instance is 40% *faster* than
>     the old pkgbox32 was.
>
>     I am impressed at how far hardware virtualization technology has
>     progressed.
>
>     In anycase, pkgbox32 and pkgbox64 have been moved, and the main dev
>     box (leaf) and the main repo box (crater) will be moved to blades
>     tomorrow (Thursday).  Avalon and kronos will be moved after the
>     unit is installed in the colo facility.
>
>     There may be some hicups as we do this.  Best thing to do is to get
>     onto irc (efnet) in #dragonflybsd and report issues there.  Otherwise
>     bugs@ mail works.
>
>                                         -Matt
>                                         Matthew Dillon
>                                         <dillon at backplane.com>