On Fri, 8 Feb 2013, Karanbir Singh wrote:
On 02/08/2013 05:20 PM, Steve Thompson wrote:
On Fri, 8 Feb 2013, Karanbir Singh wrote:
Xen, because of the way it works, will always get to higher density / performance than KVM when desity and reasonable performance are on the plate.
My experience is the exact opposite.
Do tell more..
I have about 5-ish years Xen experience and 2 years with KVM, covering several hundred different VM's. I switched from Xen to KVM a few weeks after trying KVM for the first time (so my Xen experience is two years out of date). All Linux VM's are PV with virtio; Windows uses virtio also. Bridged networking.
One example: the physical host was a Dell PE2900 with 8 cores and 24 GB memory, running (now) CentOS 5.9. I wished to run 38 VM's on this, with the guest O/S being various CentOS versions and Windows XP, 2003 and 7. I could never get 30 or more VM's to start under Xen. It did not matter in which order I started the 30 VM's; the 30th machine always (no matter which one it was) failed to boot. There were periodic strange failures with the Xen guests, and accurate time keeping was always a problem.
I switched to KVM just to see what the fuss was about. Using the same disk images as input, I had the 30 VM's up and running without fuss in less than 2 hours. I went on to run the whole 38 in short order. I had no issues with KVM, and to this day I have several physical hosts with about 75 guests, and I have never had a single problem with KVM (really). Time keeping does not appear to be problematical.
One of my workloads consists primarily of builds of large software packages, so it is a heavy fork() load. Performance of the guests, measured in terms of both build time and network performance, has been so much better in KVM than under Xen that it's not even funny. I posted on this some time ago.
At the time of my last Xen experience, the memory assigned to all active guests had to fit simultaneously in the host's physical memory, so that provided an upper limit. With KVM, the guest's memory is pageable, and so this limit goes away (unless in a practical sense the guest are all active simultaneously, which is not true for any of my workloads).
I see the ability to run "top" as a normal user on a KVM host and see what the guests are up to as a big advantage. Sure, one can run xentop on Xen, but only if you have root access.
Xen hosts have to run a Xen-enabled kernel; not so with KVM.
I typed this off the top of my head, so I'm sure I missed a bunch of things.
Steve