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xen-devel
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.
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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