VMware Performance
Looking around for information on getting the VMware Server 2.0 beta running on Ubuntu Server 8.04 — I find it best to look online to see if people are having trouble before I waste time trying to make something work — I saw a fair few complaints about performance not being very good.
Well, I’m not quite sure what those people were talking about. I’ve set it up with a Windows XP VM on a machine that had previously been running Windows XP and as a test I hit it with my usual DVD-to-AppleTV process: rip to disk with DVD Decrypter, convert to XviD with AutoGK, convert subtitles using SubRip.
It’s been a little bit slower than the same stuff running natively, but not significantly so. I don’t have numbers — I forgot to collect stats before nuking the native XP install — but it’s doing the DVD->XviD at ~real-time, which isn’t a whole lot slower than when there was no VMware in the middle.
I’m happy enough with this, particularly given that this is batch processing — fire off a whole heap and forget about it — and that this is a beta with debug code.
Incidentally, I did try using dvd::rip from the Ubuntu packages, but the cluster support is failing — the final “put all the bits together” step barfs claiming there’s no video stream — and while I can indeed do transcodes one-at-a-time without using the cluster stuff, there’s no batch support without it. So while that would probably be faster, life is too short.
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