This might be intersting for anyone who does not have racks of servers available for testing or learning.
The VMWare's free Virtual server is an excellent tool to test and develop SMS / OSD / BDD solutions and I wanted to share with you some performance figures. Until now I had been using the Microsoft Virtual PC since it was part of the PSDN kit and then free for anyone but I wasn't always happy with the performance compared to VMWare.
The comparision favors VMWare in many ways but the performance is the main issue, what I have learnd is VPC does not run multihtreaded until you install the VPC utilities which is not available when running in WinPE and only gets installed at the last stage of a BDD master system setup, I've not tested Microsoft Virtual server which does not have this limitation but Microsoft plans however to fix this in the upcoming VPC 2007
Host PC:
Windows XP sp2 with latest hotfixes and antivirus.
1 Intel P4 630 3GHz
2GB RAM
VMWare Server 1.0.1 and VPC 2004sp1 installed but never running at the same
time.
1 HDD for host OS
1 HDD for Virtual Server files
1 HDD for Virtual Workstation
Virtual server instance:
Windows 2003 ent sp1
AD-PDC,DNS,DHCP,WINS
SQL 2000 ent sp4
SMS 2003 SP2
Original OSD using WIM 0.9 and WinPE 2004
2 virtual drives, one for BDD and images
Virtual workstation instance:
MasterXP: BDD build as simple as possible using SP2, no Office and no post
SP2 hotfixes or VM/VPC utilities
About the testing:
Host was rebooted before each test.
VMWare and VPC SMS server on same HDD but seperate partitions to prevent any
fragmentation.
Virtual workstations on the same HDD but virtual files deleted after each
step to prevent fragmentation from affecting the resaults.
WIM 0.9 and 1.0 comparsion planned but never got around doing that.
Test steps:
1. Boot from BDD lab.iso / SMS Capture CD dialog box
2. Press finish on OSD Image Capture Wizard / Shutdown
3. Power on using OSD image capture CD / Capture Complete
4. Power on using OSD image installation CD / Image install finished
Time each step takes:
1. VMWare=25min, VPC=84min
2. VMWare=20min, VPC=39min
3. VMWare=16min, VPC=31min
4. VMWare=5min, VPC=17min
Posted
Jan 08 2007, 05:07 PM
by
Larus Milan Bulat