Hello

    For the past months I've been testing upgrading my Xen hosts to CentOS 7 and I face an issue for which I need your help to solve.

    The testing machines are IBM blades, model H21 and H21XM. Initial tests were performed on the H21 with 16 GB RAM; during the last 6=7 weeks I've been using the H21XM with 64 GB. In all cases the guests were fully updated CentOS 7 -- initially 7.6 ( most recent at the time of the initial tests ), and respectively 7.8 for the tests performed during the last 2 months.  As host I used initially CentOS 6 with latest kernel available in the centos virt repo at the time of the tests and CentOS 7 with the latest kernel as well. As xen versions I tested 4.8 and 4.12 ( xl info included below ). The storage for the last tests is a Crucial MX500 but results were similar when using traditional HDD.

    My problem, in short, is that the guests are extremely slow. For instance , in the most recent tests, a yum install kernel takes cca 1 min on the host and 12-15 (!!!) minutes in the guest, all time being spent in dracut regenerating the initramfs images. I've done rough tests with the storage  ( via dd if=/dev/zero of=a_test_file size bs=10M count=1000 ) and the speed was comparable between the hosts and the guests. The version of the kernel in use inside the guest also did not seem to make any difference . OTOH, sysbench ( https://github.com/akopytov/sysbench/ ) as well as p7zip benchmark report for the guests a speed which is between 10% and 50% of the host. Quite obviously, changing the elevator had no influence either.

    Here is the info which I think that should be relevant for the software versions in use. Feel free to ask for any additional info.