Elegant Simplicity

Three brand new Sun x2200 M2 servers, each with 8GB of RAM and two dual-core 2.2GHz Opteron processors, one copy of VMWare ESX Server 3.0.1, and a bunch of production servers that need virtualized ASAP.

I rack mount the servers, power them up, and find out that the integrated lights-out manager (ILOM) is pretty rough. Instead of a nice remote KVM like our x4100 M2 has, the entire ILOM reboots with the server. This means that a CD install that has a boot menu with a default time out is a royal PITA. You have to close the browser immediately after rebooting the server, use “ping -t” with the ILOM IP address waiting for it to come back to life, then re-connect the web browser as soon as possible to get to the CD menu before the 10 second timeout occurs.

Next, we start the ESX server installation and it can’t see any hard drives. Sigh. Turns out that the “Supports VMWare” blurb on Sun’s web page isn’t exactly correct. VMWare ESX server isn’t supported until version 3.0.2, which at this time is unavailable with no expected release date. The support group at VMWare suggests I install VMWare Server instead on top of a linux host. Ok then, off to download openSUSE.

OpenSUSE installed without any major issues. I installed the 64 bit version and added the 32 bit compatibility layers for the VMWare prerequisites. Also, a compiler for VMWare to use to link itself with. VMWare Server installed fine.

Next, I brought up a virtual machine. All looked well, except for the clock which was running strangely. Either way too slow or way too fast. I struggled with the clock for several hours, trying various VMWare specific settings that I found on the discussion forums, as well as the VMWare knowledge base. The clocking got better, but under any kind of load at all, the windows second hand was spinning wildly. At one point, I saw it jump 30 seconds in a single “tick”. Egads.

The conclusion presented itself late last night. As it turns out, “cat /proc/cpuinfo” on the linux host was showing that I had two dual core 1GHz processors. AMD has a PowerNow! feature that automatically throttles the clock speed with the amount of work being done. Since VMWare and its guests are tied very closely to the CPU clock, the system as a whole couldn’t keep time as well as an old 15th century water clock. I disabled PowerNow! in the BIOS and lo-and-behold, the clock problem is now just a few milliseconds per day.

VMWare needs to document this. Badly. In big, bold print.