Thread: Running Postgresl in a virual machine

Hello,

I am creating a small web app that uses Postgres.  The number of hits/day will be small, maybe a 1000 pages/day.  I'm planning on running this in a virtual machine, (Windows Server 2008 with the virtual machine hosting Postgres running Windows Server 2003 R2 x64, or maybe XP x64). The database will have it's own mirrored disks, and the server has plenty of horsepower and RAM.

Backup will be copying the quiesced virtual machine disks to a NAS.

Does anyone have any experience running Postgres in a virtual machine, or recommendations (or could point me to a place where I could read more about Postgres and Virtual machines)?  Thanks.

Rich S.

Richard Sickler wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am creating a small web app that uses Postgres.  The number of
> hits/day will be small, maybe a 1000 pages/day.  I'm planning on
> running this in a virtual machine, (Windows Server 2008 with the
> virtual machine hosting Postgres running Windows Server 2003 R2 x64,
> or maybe XP x64). The database will have it's own mirrored disks, and
> the server has plenty of horsepower and RAM.
>
> Backup will be copying the quiesced virtual machine disks to a NAS.
>
> Does anyone have any experience running Postgres in a virtual machine,
> or recommendations (or could point me to a place where I could read
> more about Postgres and Virtual machines)?  Thanks.
>
> Rich S.

Here is something that might interest you
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Running_&_Installing_PostgreSQL_On_Native_Windows

In response to Richard Sickler <richard.sickler@avagotech.com>:

> Hello,
>
> I am creating a small web app that uses Postgres.  The number of hits/day
> will be small, maybe a 1000 pages/day.  I'm planning on running this in a
> virtual machine, (Windows Server 2008 with the virtual machine hosting
> Postgres running Windows Server 2003 R2 x64, or maybe XP x64). The database
> will have it's own mirrored disks, and the server has plenty of horsepower
> and RAM.
>
> Backup will be copying the quiesced virtual machine disks to a NAS.
>
> Does anyone have any experience running Postgres in a virtual machine, or
> recommendations (or could point me to a place where I could read more about
> Postgres and Virtual machines)?  Thanks.

For the load you're talking about, I wouldn't expect any problems.

The biggest issue I've had with virtual machines is that the disk IO
is usually crap compared to native access to the disks (experience is
mostly using VMWare, other hypervisors may not have this problem)

--
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com
http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/

Richard Sickler wrote:
> Does anyone have any experience running Postgres in a virtual machine, or
> recommendations (or could point me to a place where I could read more about
> Postgres and Virtual machines)?  Thanks.

Not done it on a Windows VM, but there shouldn't be any special
difficulties. Performance shouldn't be a real issue with only a handful
of hits. I've had problems with disk i/o under VMs, but that might just
be me.

You might want to try with quite a small amount of memory allocated to
the VM. It could be that a small VM with the host left to handle disk
caching is fine for your needs.

Oh, if you really want to squeeze it down look at running a pared-down
freebsd/linux vm with just PostgreSQL running. I'd have thought you
could turn off more services in *nix than Windows.

--
  Richard Huxton
  Archonet Ltd