[CentOS-virt] Drupal/MySQL performance in Xen and OpenVZ

Wed Jun 8 16:13:31 UTC 2011
Einar S. Idsø <einar.centos at norsk-esport.no>

Hi Eric,

On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 4:33 PM, Eric Shubert <ejs at shubes.net> wrote:

> Is your goal absolute best performance (why?), or simply adequate
> performance?
>

The hardware available to us is quite old, so pushing performance is
absolutely the key issue. Stability/reliability and ease of maintenance are
of course also factors. But since I've not have any bad experiences with
OpenVZ in those respects, and I expect Xen to be at least as good, it pretty
much comes down to performance.


> I wouldn't expect to see Xen outperform OpenVZ. However, if your CPU has
> has virtualization extensions, I would expect performance to be pretty
> close between the two.
>

Unfortunately it doesn't. We're doing a "parallell shift" from a host with
2xOpteron 250 (2.4GHz) to another host with 8xOpteron 880 (also 2.4GHz but
dual-core), so apart from the increase in number of cores from 2 to 16 and
amount of RAM from 6 to 32GB there's no real difference to be found. But
since we're transitioning anyway, we're giving alternative technology a
consideration.

But okay, are you saying that Xen will at best be as good as OpenVZ using
this hardware, and there's really not much point in me spending time
learning Xen and running performance tests? That would save me quite a few
workdays :)

That being said, if you're considering Xen, I'd give strong
> consideration to KVM as well.
>

Thanks, I already looked at KVM, but it seems to require the virtualization
bit, which means it is not an option for us.

Thanks for your input, Eric, it is much appreciated :)

Cheers,
Einar
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-virt/attachments/20110608/c999ba0d/attachment-0003.html>