VM and performance (was Re: [Beowulf] best Linux distribution)

[Peter St. John]

The restriction in the EULA seems overly broad to me.
First, it seems unenforceable (but I'm not a lawyer). Imaging a publisher
who says "you may read this book but you may not publish a review of it
without approval from us first" or GM saying "you may drive this car but you
may not divulge your MPG or cruising speed" etc.
Second, it seems highly undesirable for VMWare to enforce it. Would they
want to bring more publicity to bad performance results by suing the
whistleblower? who is only a customer, not an employee? Of course anyone
would sue in the case of libel by fabricating or otherwise mistating poor
results.

I have nothing against VMWare but I dislike unenforceable, overly-broad
restriction clauses.

Peter (YJMV, your jurisdiction may vary :-)


On 10/9/07, Olli-Pekka Lehto <oplehto at csc.fi> wrote:
>
> Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:
> > The recent emails from rgb and Doug lead me to a question. Has anyone
> > tested codes running under a VM versus running them "natively" on
> > the hardware (native isn't a good word and I hope everyone gets my
> > meaning)?  The last word I heard is that performance takes a substantial
> > hit if you are running a code in a VM. Some of the reasons are that the
> > code has only virtualized access to the hardware (particularly the NICs)
> > and memory management is a bit more difficult (although Barcelona with
> > nested page tables should help there). I do remember VirtualIron saying
> > that they had IB drivers so that the VM had direct access to the
> hardware.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Jeff
> >
>
> I ran some comparisons this spring on a small 4*2P AMD Opteron cluster
> using VMWare Player and Workstation. The results seemed quite promising
> and I'd like to share them but the VMWare EULA restricts the publication
> of unvetted results:
>
> "You may use the Software to conduct internal performance testing and
> benchmarking studies, the results of which you (and not unauthorized
> third parties) may publish or publicly disseminate; provided that VMware
> has reviewed and approved of the methodology, assumptions and other
> parameters of the study. Please contact VMware at benchmark at vmware.com
> to request such review."
>
> I just sent a request to VMWare about this. Let's see what they say...
>
> --
> Olli-Pekka Lehto, Systems Specialist, Special Computing, CSC
> PO Box 405 02101 Espoo, Finland; tel +358 9 457 2215, fax +358 9 4572302
> CSC is the Finnish IT Center for Science, www.csc.fi,
> e-mail: Olli-Pekka.Lehto at csc.fi
>
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