Configuring Your Virtual Machine (VM)

If you chose either of our floating license features you can install and run dsTest in a virtual machine. VM platforms must satisfy the same minimum system requirements as bare-metal platforms. Although dsTest cannot achieve the same performance running in a VM as it can when running in the native OS, how you configure your VM can impede its performance and in some cases can prevent dsTest from running altogether.

In order to achieve the best performance the VM configuration must mirror the underlying hardware configuration and the virtual CPUs must be pinned to physical CPUs. In addition, fully enabling SR-IOV on the host platform will aid in VM I/O performance.

VM platforms must portray a realistic hardware configuration. Non-standard configurations, such as those with odd number of cores and/or chip configurations may introduce operational anomalies with dsTest. If the number of chips configured is greater than the number of cores per chip dsTest will fail to launch and will return the following error:

Non-realistic hardware configuration (x chips; y cores/chip) (where x and y indicate the number of chips/sockets and cores dsTest detected)

If you are unsure of the hardware architecture you can execute the lscpu command in the host's OS:

~> lscpu

Architecture:          x86_64

CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit

Byte Order:            Little Endian

CPU(s):                6

On-line CPU(s) list:   0-5

Thread(s) per core:    1

Core(s) per socket:    6

Socket(s):             1

NUMA node(s):          1

Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel

CPU family:            6

Model:                 45

Model name:            Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2430L 0 @ 2.00GHz

Stepping:              7

CPU MHz:               1223.876

CPU max MHz:           2500.0000

CPU min MHz:           1200.0000

BogoMIPS:              3999.82

Virtualization:        VT-d

L1d cache:             32K

L1i cache:             32K

L2 cache:              256K

L3 cache:              15360K

NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0-5

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