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xen-devel
RE: [Xen-devel] A Performance Comparison of Hypervisors
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xen-devel-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:xen-devel-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
> Anthony Liguori
> Sent: 03 February 2007 16:15
> To: Nicholas Lee
> Cc: Xen development list
> Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] A Performance Comparison of Hypervisors
>
> Nicholas Lee wrote:
> > Obviously not a very fair comparison [1]. I can't see how this was
> > done well at all.
>
> I wonder why you say this. I thought the benchmark was done
> very well.
> What we need is more benchmarking, not less. Unfortunately, VMware
> makes publishing benchmarks difficult as you have to get
> their approval.
>
> This benchmark tells us something, the question is what does it tell
> us. Let's take a look at the benchmarks they choose.
> SPECcpu2000 and
> SPECjbb2005 are two favorite benchmarks of virtualization
> vendors. They
> are favorites because everyone does well under them :-) Both aren't
> sensitive to PTE update or context switch latency and don't
> involve IO
> very much. Even QEMU wouldn't look so bad against these :-)
>
> I'm not familiar with Passmark, but it looks like it's mostly CPU
> bound. For all of these virtualization friendly workloads, Xen does
> pretty well compared to VMware. For some of the Passmark bits, Xen
> actually inches out VMware. Considering we're Open Source,
> they really
> have no excuse to ever be slower than we are :-)
>
> The compile workload was, IMHO, the most serious of the benchmarks.
> VMware walloped us on that one. I suspect that's a some
> shadow paging
> overhead and perhaps some disk IO overhead.
>
> The Netperf results are a tad silly. They choose Win2k3 for
> the guest
> OS. They installed a paravirtual network driver in their guest
> (vmxnet). However, since no PV network driver is available
> for Windows
> for Xen 3.0.3, they used emulated IO[1]. Of course
> performance is going
> to suck.
>
> I would have rather seen the benchmarks done with a Linux guest using
> the PV drivers that are in the tree.
>
> The only embarrassing part is that they weren't able to boot a Win2k3
> guest with SMP support. I suspect we need either more QA for
> HVM or a
> better statement of supported guest confirmations.
I believe official support for SMP HVM guest wasn't in there until
3.0.4, so not really surprising that it doesn't work right in 3.0.3 ;-)
[It was, I think, possible to make SMP HVM guests work, but it involved
recompiling the BIOS code, which of course is a bit beyond what you'd
expect the average reviewer to do...]
--
Mats
>
> Regards,
>
> Anthony Liguori
>
> [1] The PV drivers that come in XenEnterprise are, AFAIK, only for
> XenEnterprise.
>
> > VMWare are a bit silly to release stuff like this, just lowers the
> > whole game.
> >
> >
> > [1] http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/resources/711
> >
> --------------------------------------------------------------
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> >
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> >
>
>
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>
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