We have used a number of these, done a ton of benchmarking and here is a quick summary of my opinions. This could end up being a "holy war", but hope not. Almost all testing was run using iSCSI storage and typically bonded Gig interfaces and identical hardware/tests performed. We used pretty much the entire Phoronix test suite for getting overall comparisons.
Here are my observations: 1. Both Xen and VMWare offer the best and easiest to use interface. If price was not a factor I prefer Vsphere but Xen is more reasonably priced. The "free" version of VMWare's stuff seems to be going away in version 5 so that might be an issue if you are going to use the free versions. 2. Unless you need Live Migration or some of the other features of the paid versions the free perform identical. 3. We saw them Xen/VMWare about 65%-75% of the bare metal results using our benchmarks (* see disclaimer below). 4. KVM based virtualization was near 75%-80% of bare metal (* again disclaimer) 5. Containers (OpenVZ or Proxmox (does KVM/Containers and nice web interface)) hit nearly 98% of bare metal! So, if you are virtualizing a lot of Linux systems and can live with the caveats of containers they provide excellent performance. 6. If you are looking to sell virtual machines to customers you might want to look at Parallels bare metal servers with the web addition. This works very similar to OpenVZ (they are related) and provides KVM/Containers. We have tested version 5 a bunch as well and performance matches the FOSS stuff, with a very nice interface. In addition it allows for all sorts of accounting/limits on disk, CPU, network traffic,... if needed. * There are two factors we have seen contributing to this. First, using iSCSI in a virt machine you get the drivers for the Ethernet dropping perf a few percent. Also, since the bare metal machine had ALL of the RAM, while we typically gave virtual machines 4GB for testing they were able to do more file/block caching which bumped rates on some of those tests. Your workload that you are looking to virtualize will be a big factor in picking the proper tool. We have all three in production at this point, but will probably settle on one going forward, most likely Containers/KVM since we like the blend of performance and versatility this provides in addition to the FOSS portion. * Larry A. Weidig (lwei...@excel.net <mailto:lwei...@excel.net> ) * Excel.Net,Inc. - http://www.excel.net/ <http://www.excel.net/> * (920) 452-0455 - Sheboygan/Plymouth area * (888) 489-9995 - Other areas, toll-free From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Josh Luthman Sent: Monday, July 25, 2011 10:38 AM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] OT: Linux Virtualization Xen and Vmware are pretty good. I would not suggest using a Linux distro and would go with a bare metal (vsphere, xen's alternative) Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373 On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 11:34 AM, Matt <lm7...@gmail.com> wrote: I have worked with Linux quite a little mainly with CentOS as an email server etc. I was curious about trying to do some virtualization now. Leaning towards FOSS. Seems like OpenVZ is easiest to implement but also looking at KVM and XEM also. Seems that CentOS 6 will be focusing on KVM. What else is everyone doing here? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
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