Re: [Xen-users] Xen vs VMWare comparison paper

[Jeff Sturm <jeff.sturm@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of Fajar A. Nugraha
> Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2012 9:14 PM
>
> > http://morse.colorado.edu/~tlen5710/12s/VMware.pdf
> 
> Anyway, taking a quick glance, the benchmark was using SQL 2005 (which implies
> windows), but searching for the words "pv", "para", or "driver" returns no 
> result. So
> it's only normal that xen performs terrible on that benchmark.

100% agreed.  You can't expect that paper to be objective given the source, can 
you?  Anyway, we have some fairly large Xen deployments with multiple, 
clustered dom0 hosts and hundreds of Linux PV guests.  I can tell you 
confidently that the I/O bottleneck is our SAN implementation, not the network, 
not blkback/blkfront, or anything else in Xen.  I've gotten throughput of 
200MB/s sequential from PV guests, which is the limit of our network, but 
unfortunately random I/O is the norm for us so we never really achieve 
throughput anywhere near our theoretical limit.

My advice: If you want performance and you're willing to do it the "Xen way" 
with Linux PV guests (or maybe Windows HVM and suitable drivers), Xen will do 
fine.  If on the other hand you want something that will work "just like 
VMWare" and support Windows natively with no special drivers, then yeah, the 
VMWare paper is probably really relevant to you.  (And even then I thought 
VMWare needed virtual drivers to perform optimally.  At least on Linux.)

-Jeff



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