On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 3:15 PM, T o n g
<mlist4suntong@yahoo.com> wrote:
Hi,
Talking about VM, some prefer virtulbox, some VMWare. Don't know how many
of you prefer kvm. I'm wondering if you could do the speed benchmark of
your preferred VM, and compare the result to that of your host.
per vmware benches, afaik, it's against their licensing policy to publish them. hence, you'll never see such a thing (unless it's vmware propaganda). everyone else has published strengths and weaknesses.
The reason that I'm asking -- recently I noticed that my kvm is extremely
slow, its disk access seems at least 10 times slower (*12 hours* to
restore a 600M partition?!). Googling revealed that's a known problem.
e.g.,
http://blog.kagesenshi.org/2008/03/qemu-slow-disk-throughput.html
"... I uses Qemu for hosting the guest OS for my development environment.
For 2 days, I keep wondering why Zope/Plone loads damn slow on the qemu
machine eventhough I have allocated both cores of the processor, and
512RAM for it. 15 minutes simply to start up is really not desirable. I
kept on investigating and guess what:
iirc, qemu is pretty slow. however, your main issue here is probably not installing the drivers for your guest - no matter what virtual environment you choose, you should strongly consider installing the 'tools' on the guests (ie - install them unless you have a good reason not to). also, look at how the virtual switch is setup, where the virtual disks are stored (local, nfs, iscsi, firbe, etc) and see that there is no congestion there. make sure that allocated ram is actually using ram - most virtual solutions will allow you to store the ram on a disk which is cool but slow as hell.
lastly, i either use virtualbox or proxmox. virtualbox works great if i want something up and running quick that i don't really need to manage (also has some pretty cool usb support). proxmox is good, free hardware virtualization that combines qemu and kvm and has tons of cool (esx like) features for free. want to pay for stuff and want decent support, install esx. if you want a ton of windows hosts that won't use too much memory, use hyper-v with the windows paravirtualization.
none of this answered your benchmark question. frankly, i probably never will :) benchmarks cost too much time and money to do right and someone always wants to argue with them. also, when you bench a vm, you can't rely on the process monitoring in the vm due to time skew. so, you're left with tools built for the task which tend to start costing $$$.
... given that i didn't answer your benchmark question, i hope something in here helped.