[CentOS-virt] performance differences between kvm/xen

Mon Oct 25 15:14:58 UTC 2010
Todd Deshane <deshantm at gmail.com>

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 3:56 PM, Grant McWilliams
<grantmasterflash at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Grant McWilliams
> <grantmasterflash at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 3:29 AM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 10/21/2010 12:01 AM, Grant McWilliams wrote:
>>> > So what we're on the verge of doing here is creating a test set... I'd
>>> > love to see a shell script that ran a bunch of tests, gathered data
>>> > about the system and then created an archive that would then be
>>> > uploaded
>>> > to a website which created graphs. Dreaming maybe but it would be
>>> > consistent. So what goes in our testset?
>>>
>>> I am trying to create just that - a kickstart that will build a machine
>>> as a Xen dom0, build 4 domU's, fire up puppet inside the domU's do the
>>> testing and scp results into a central git repo. Then something similar
>>> for KVM.
>>>
>>> will get the basic framework online today.
>>>
>>> - KB
>>> ______
>>
>> Do you suppose you could get it to use Phoronix Test Suite so
>> we can start to have measurable stats? We could do the same thing for any
>> VM software - even
>> the ones that don't allow publishing stats in the EULA...
>>
>> I'm also wondering if we should do the whole test suite or a subset.
>> Here is the list of tests..
>>
>
> One thing that I think probably needs to be modified for our needs is a Dom0
> controller to run various tests in each DomU simultaneously then collate the
> date.
> Virtual worlds are more complex than non-virtual ones. Sometimes something
> runs great in on VM but drags when multiple VMs are being used.

I was also going to mention that we should look at scalability and
performance isolation.
Some references and previous studies here:

http://todddeshane.net/research/Xen_versus_KVM_20080623.pdf
http://clarkson.edu/~jnm/publications/isolation_ExpCS_FINALSUBMISSION.pdf
http://clarkson.edu/~jnm/publications/freenix04-clark.pdf

Also, is there anybody that has access to or would be able to get
access to run SPECvirt?
http://www.spec.org/virt_sc2010/

Thanks,
Todd

-- 
Todd Deshane
http://todddeshane.net
http://runningxen.com