While it has its set of problems and complications, when used correctly this technology can really please you with some great advantages over the one-operating-system-for-one-server paradigm vastly used in the x86 arena.īut, assumed that virtual machines make sense in your environment, what is the best virtualization software to choose? There are many virtualizer and paravirtualizer available today, and some once-commercial virtualization softwares are now freely released (for examples, think to VMware Server and Citrix XenServer). Why? Simply stated, this technology promise better server utilization, better server management, better power efficiency, and, oh yes, some other random pick of better things! The obvious question is if virtual machines technology really provide this better experience. And boy would I publish the shit out of those documents.Today, “Virtual machine” seems to be a magic words in the computer industry. I don't know if I'll get the opportunity to test on like hardware any time soon, but I'd really like to. Given the much higher specced hardware on VMWare's side (both the connections to the storage, and the storage itself) I would have expected VMWare to blitz the test. Results were all over the place (some wins to VMWare, some to KVM). VMWare was running VMFS over 4Gbit/s FC to a HP EVA SAN with 15KRPM FC disks (again, 3GHz Xeon on the host), and RHEL5 KVM was running block-level iSCSI to another RHEL5 box with internal 7200RPM SATA storage (iSCSI LUNs carved up per LV) over 1Gbit/s copper Ethernet (again, 1.6GHz Xeon). Unfortunately my Bonnie++ tests were not 'apples to apples'.

They were totally shocked when they saw the differences.įor shits and giggles we also benchmarked HP-UX's Integrity Virtual Machine platform (VSOE), and it peaked at 2.5Gbit/s on a 1.6GHz Itanium2 box.

Strangely enough none of them had ever done the same tests, and confirmed it on their own kit back in their lab. We had VMWare gold partners and networking experts totally stunned with that. VMWare managed a pitiful 800Mbit/s on a 3.0GHz Nahalem Xeon host (not even Gbit speed, despite being almost twice the clockspeed under the hood!).

RHEL5's KVM managed 2.6Gbit/s between two VMs on a single 1.8GHz Nahalem Xeon host. Click to expand.I've done both of those internally now.

Xen vs kvm vs virtualbox vs vmware