[CentOS] XEN or KVM - performance/stability/security?
Gordon Messmer
yinyang at eburg.com
Fri May 11 22:46:43 UTC 2012
A late reply, but hopefully a useful set of feedback for the archives:
On 04/20/2012 05:59 AM, Rafał Radecki wrote:
> Key factors from my opint of view are:
> - stability (which one runs more smoothly on CentOS?)
I found that xenconsoled could frequently crash in Xen dom0, and that
guests would be unable to reboot until it was fixed. I also found that
paravirt CentOS domUs would not boot if they were updated before the
dom0. In short, Xen paravirt was very fragile and troublesome. I never
tested Xen with hardware virtualization.
I have had no such problems with KVM. In my experience KVM is much more
stable than Xen paravirtualization. Xen HVM probably would suffer at
least some of the same problems.
> - performance (XEN PV/HVM(with or without pv drivers) vs KVM HVM(with or
> without pv drivers))
PV drivers will make some difference, but the biggest performance
difference you'll see is probably the difference between file-backed VMs
and LVM-backed VMs. File-backed VMs are extremely slow. Whichever
system you choose, use LVMs as the backing for your guests.
> - security
There have been bugs that allow guests to escalate privileges and access
host resources, but they're relatively few. I don't think there's a
significant difference between the two in this area.
Overall I advise the use of KVM. It should be more stable, and has the
advantage of Red Hat support.
More information about the CentOS
mailing list