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Network Commectivity Lost when Low CPU on Host OS

Posted: 25. Jun 2009, 08:07
by talkout
Hi,

I'm running VirtualBox PUEL 2.2.4 on a host OS RHEL 4.7 and I have a RHEL 5.2 as the guest OS on the VB. I use bridged networking for network connectivity. I'm running the VirtualBox in the headless mode and using SSH to access.

All the network connectivity are lost when the CPU share for the VirtuaBox process goes down around 30%. But the VirtualBox is still running inside the server and I'm able to gain access back when the VB gets more CPU.

1. What could be the possible cause for this?
2. Is there a way I can assure the VirtualBox process get certain amount of CPU share?
3. Is there any possibility of setting this at OS level on RHEL?

Thanks.
NiMaL

Re: Network Commectivity Lost when Low CPU on Host OS

Posted: 25. Jun 2009, 15:03
by fixedwheel
Hi, you could try setting divider=10 kernel parm in the guests /boot/grub/grub.conf to reduce the hosts high CPU load caused by the Red Hat 1000Hz timer from the guest.

example cut'n'paste from a 4.7 CentOS guest:

Code: Select all

title CentOS (2.6.9-78.0.13.EL)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-78.0.13.EL ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet divider=10
        initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.9-78.0.13.EL.img


maybe it could help as well to apply the divider=10 to the RHEL host for better CPU throughput, but its like mandatory doing it first on the guest

Re: Network Commectivity Lost when Low CPU on Host OS

Posted: 26. Jun 2009, 14:16
by talkout
Thank you.

I will try that, and lets see if it works for me.