Comments on: How slow is VMWare (Server)?

By: Paul Swart

Paul Swart — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:55:51 +0000

We are looking for someone to perform similar tests with a VMware add-on solution we have that may offer improved performance. This would be on a contracted project basis. If you are interested, let me know and I’ll outline the tests.

By: Lotsa FreeBSD » VirtualBox

Lotsa FreeBSD » VirtualBox — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:57:20 +0000

[...] is too good to be true, compared to what I got previously on the same hardware in VMWare previously (in short: a score of [...]

By: Dan Parsons

Dan Parsons — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 07:50:31 +0000

FYI, Red Hat 7 is not used as the “virtual machine manager” for ESX. It is currently based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 3, however there is an important distinction to be made. When the physical hardware boots, it loads RHEL. RHEL eventually loads the ESX kernel (through the kernel module interface) which then completely takes over the bare metal and transfers the running RHEL image into a separate VM, managed by the ESX kernel. The RHEL VM is then used for the management interface.

In other words: ESX uses RHEL as a bootloader and then a management interface. The actual grunt work is done by VMware’s proprietary ESX kernel.

By: ivoras

ivoras — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:33:32 +0000

I don’t see any problems with what you want to do. Maybe the first thing you should do is decide which aspects of the system you want to measure and measure each of them separately; for example: CPU, IO, context switching, etc. Then you can compare the system in each of the categories.

By: bleser

bleser — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:48:51 +0000

Hi, I am writing my diploma about virtualization. In the last part of my work i want to test using some benchmarks (one of them is unixbench). I’ve instaled two kinds of virtual machines on Ubunu 8.04 on my Toshiba T2330 (2 GB RAM): Vmware Workstation 6.04 and Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6.2. Vmware has got a lot of usefull function like cloning or taking a snapshot. But how can i test them? I want to run unixbench on my host system, then run openSuse 11 on vmware and test with unixbench, and the run virtualbox with openSuse 11 on virtual machine and then – compare it.. Do u think is it good idea?

I also wanto to test by IOmeter, but i have some problems to run it on ubuntu;/

Is there any other tests/benchmarks i can use for my work?

Thanks for advice.

By: ivoras

ivoras — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:29:36 +0000

Linux hosts weren’t tested because I don’t have any available. I agree that ESX is much faster by design; I didn’t expect that the “plain” VMWare Server would be that much slower than it – hence the post.

Calling it “unusable” was a bit over the top though; there are workloads where performance is not that important.

By: Dave Johnson

Dave Johnson — Wed, 28 May 2008 23:40:35 +0000

The performance impact of the Windows host in addition to that of the VMWare virtualization translation is evident in your test.

Out of curiosity, why was a LInux host OS not benchmarked?

VMWare themselves use a modified Redhat 7 as the Virtual Machine Manager for their enterprise ESX product. VMWare Server supports both Windows and various flavors of Linux as the host OS. I would expect a lightweight variant of Linux a much better reference than Windows. Is your expectation that Windows will yield faster throughput than Linux? Historical data does not necessarily back up such an assumption.

-=dave

By: Consumer Electronics Reviews

Consumer Electronics Reviews — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 02:19:06 +0000

Consumer Electronics Reviews…

I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…

By: Chris Buechler

Chris Buechler — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 04:07:09 +0000

Of course there’s significant overhead in virtualizing with hosted products. VMware Server is perfectly fine for small, development, and test environments. It’s not meant to serve as a production solution in an enterprise network. The disk overhead is bad on Server. It’s not as bad if you use pre-filled disks rather than growing ones, but the performance hit vs. the bare metal is significant. For low load machines, that doesn’t matter. For high load machines where you actually need close to the bare metal’s capabilities, you need to be running ESX.

I’ve done similar testing except using Windows and IOMeter as the comparison. Server is significantly slower than bare metal, but ESX is very close. It’s more than usable in enterprise environments.

Your “unusable in production” statement contradicts reality. Millions of companies use Server and ESX in production with largely satisfactory results.