Flash media server 3 on VMWare virtual machine

[golden_au]

Do any one know can a FMS 3 run smoothly on a vmware virtual machine? if yes, is there any requirement need to be aware? thanks for any adivse.

[KevinStreeter]

We don't "officially" support running the FMS under a VM, and I would not
recommend using a VM for a production server. The developers here do routinely
use VMWare for testing purposes, so you may have some success using a VM for
testing your applications.

The biggest problem we have encountered (so far!) using VMWare is that the
clock of the VM tends to be very jittery compared to a dedicated machine. This
jitter can lead to variations in the various clock-based operations performed
by the FMS, particularly buffering and transmitting media data.

[golden_au]

Thanks KevinStreeter, your reply is very important for us.

now I am assigned to evaluate the FMS 3 and work out the recommended hardware.
are there aspects I should be aware or consider when we choose hardware? or how
can I perform a test after I install FMS3? It seems that the system requirement
of FMS3 is high.

[Ransom Weaver]

Rather than VMWare you may want to consider a operating system-level
virtualization. I recommend OpenVZ. This has excellent native speed
performance for the guest OS. I have This system with the host and guests all
CentOS4.5, running variously FMS2, FMS3, Red5 etc in the guests. Its super
easy to start, stop, clone, distroy the guests. the guests can be firewalled
from the host. You can set guaranteed min and max memory allocations for the
guests.

You can run Linux distros as guests that differ from the host, but you can't
run non-linux guests, unlike in VMWare.

Also, the default resource allocations for the newly created OpenVZ guests are
insufficient to run FMS in, so the config file for the guest needs to be
changed.