virtualizing XP under Linux and remote IE testing

[dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 11:42:11PM -0500, Ryan Pugatch wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I currently have 32 Windows XP machines virtualized on a CentOS machine 
> under Xen.  They're used for testing websites under IE (and are accessed 
> via RDP).  Unfortunately, I have been having horrible performance issues 
> with Windows XP under Xen.  I've emailed the centos-virt list to see if 
> anyone has ideas about that.  What I'm hoping to find out from people on 
> this list is other suggestions on what to use to virtualize XP under 
> Linux or if Xen is what most people are using.  Secondly, I'm curious 
> what people use for testing sites under Internet Explorer (my devs all 
> use Macs, and I don't want to have them virtualize on their machines). 
> Plus, they need to be able to test under IE6 and IE7/8.

32 XP VMs on one machine. Hrm. How many CPUs does the host have?
How are the CPU loads? What kind of disk system? How are the I/O loads?
How much RAM? Is there any swapping?

Half of my devs use Macs, and half use Linux; when we need to test IE,
we either walk over to Windows desktops that don't do anything else or
VNC into them. We don't need 32 of them, though.

-dsr-

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