> I just had a question regarding virtualization, I have a processor > that does not have VMX support, so KVM has to use qemu for the > hypervisor and its quite slow. Does anyone really run VMs like this > in production?
It depends on which architecture you are virtualizing: if your target is an x86/x86_64, hardware assisted virtualization is the correct choice, otherwise you could trade a lot of performances for some flexibility (doing properly an emulation and non a virtualization). >Would you guys say the trend towards virtualization > has moved in favor of relying on VMX in the cpu for full > virtualization only? Yes, see this article from LWN: http://lwn.net/Articles/353853/ ==== We ran a few experiments to compare performance of VMware's paravirtualization technique (VMI) and hardware MMU technologies (HWMMU) on VMware's hypervisor. To give some background, VMI is VMware's paravirtualization specification which tries to optimize CPU and MMU operations of the guest operating system. For more information take a look at this http://www.vmware.com/interfaces/paravirtualization.html In most of the benchmarks, EPT/NPT (hwmmu) technologies are at par or provide better performance compared to VMI. The experiments included comparing performance across various micro and real world like benchmarks. ==== Note that, just some years before, K. Adams and O. Agesen from VMWare, wrote this excellent article (still an excellent reading) on ACM SIGOPS, "A comparison of software and hardware techniques for x86 virtualization", where they conclude on favor of VMI. _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
