VM Creation Time

Harvester
#1

Hey All,

New to Harvester and I’m working on a “Frankenstein” HCI project to test Harvester out. What is normal start up time for a VM? Has anyone had the experience of VMs taking more than an hour to start? I’m working on spinning up a Centos 8 VM and it’s clocked at 15 hours still in the “starting” phase. I’m assuming this is a hardware issue as the machines I’m using are old desktops.

Current Setup (hence frankenstein):
3 nodes
Dell Optiplex 790 - i3 4Gb ram
Dell Optiplex 330 - Pentium Dual Core 2Gb ram
HP Pavillion Slimline s5220y - Pentium E5300 2Gb ram

Totally understand if the solution is “get actual servers” but any additional ideas on how to get past the “starting” phase would be awsome.

#2

It’s certainly not measured in hours.

Yes, the shape of the case doesn’t matter as far as “actual servers”, but “machines with modern processors” is a problem.

Guessing a bit since only you only list one actual CPU model, but these look like 10-13 year old CPUs and I think at least 2 of 3 are lacking support for even basic the virtualization (VT-x) needed to run VMs.

#3

When testing Harvester on a small old machine without enough disk space I found that spinning up VMs took an infinite amount of time (the VM never started).

So for a home lab I bought a NUC sized PC with a 8 core AMD CPU, threw in 64GB RAM and a 2TB SSD. Harvester is ticking along nicely and VMs start in seconds.

I might buy another just to see how well a cluster works.