Xen and VmWare are two most popular server virtualization hypervisors. It is always interesting to know how they compare with each other. I came across this video.
Test setup consists of 1U dell PE 1950, Intel Quad Cores with 8Gbytes of RAM and external iSCSI storage DELL PE2850. Two kinds of tests were done - In the first test, Windows terminal servers is run as VM and terminal setup rate was measured. In the second test three more virtual machines are used - Web server, File Server containing home directories of terminal server users and Domain Controller for authenticating the user. It appears that any GET on webserver gets the file from the file server.
It appears that XenEnterprise 3 and ESX 3.0 is used in performance measurements.
According to the video, there is not much performance difference between Xen and ESX in the first test case. In the second test case, ESX performed 3 times better. Test results and analysis is done appear to be pointing disk IO bandwidth.
It seems that CPU and memory utilization by Xen and ESX are almost same. ESX is slightly better. Disk IO seems to the bottleneck on Xen side.
These results are big surprise to me. Xen with Paravirtualization should give equal, if not better performance. It was not clear from the video presentation that whether PV enabled OS was used in the tests.
I suggest to look at the video and make your own conclusions. I will post here if I come across any performance comparisons in future.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
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