Subject: Re: [vserver] Pros and Cons of 32/64bit guests on 64bit host
From: Chuck <chuck@sbbsnet.net>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:22:54 -0400

On Wednesday 20 August 2008, Oliver Welter wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I am running vserver on 32bit boxes for years now. I am know replacing
> one group of nodes with nice Dual AMD Quad-Cores which run a 64bit
> debian host OS.
> 
> As I have to update the guests anyway (I used and will use gentoo for
> them), so I am considering to move them to 64bit, too. The guests are
> several LAMP servers, mysql and postgres and a set of qmail nodes.
> 
> The only issue that is an obvious go for 64bit would be memory segments
> >3GB, but I guess I wont have guests who use it. So, anybody here can
> give pros and cons for 32/64 bit guests?
> 

we have converted all our servers but one to 64bit with 64bit guests and a few 
32bit that are needed and i have never looked back.  we have a number of 
64bit guests running proprietary 32bit apps and they work just fine. 

there can be a few considerations as brought up by cedric and martin in a few 
next msgs, but in general, i have never had a problem and the performance 
increase was noticable in every case. our customers even commented things 
seem faster and they did not even know of the changeover.


the only issues i find with what i do/use with 64bit is with workstations and 
workstation-guests and 99.99% of those issues are flash and java related on 
firefox. other than that a 64bit guest workstation works just as well as my 
dedicated workstation.

i am quite pleased with Gentoo's 64bit system and highly recommend it to 
anyone. we have a few redhat-clone 64bit guests that we need to use because 
the application requires them and won't even install otherwise, but as soon 
as i figure out all the install situations with this application, i am 
converting those over to gentoo as well. i find a noticable performance 
difference, probably due to the compiling of the o/s for the hardware rather 
than generic precompileds which have to run on multiple systems.

i highly recommend going gentoo 64bit.


> regards
> 
> Oliver
> --
> Protect your environment -  close windows and adopt a penguin!
> PGP-Key: 3B2C 8095 A7DF 8BB5 2CFF  8168 CAB7 B0DD 3985 1721
> 



-- 

Chuck