Hi,
I'm about to embark on some research and testing of different server virtualisation products (i.e. VMWare, Citrix, Oracle, Proxmox, RedHat, Hyper-V) and I wanted to ask the wonderful proxmox community if they had any advice on some good products for benchmarking performance that works on a Windows environment.
I want to check disk and network performance along with pure CPU grunt.
Also, if anyone out there has done a similar exercise before, I'd love to hear your conclusions.
If anyone is interested in my thoughts on the various products from the paper research I've done so far, read on and please contradict me if you disagree...
VMWare
Good performance, great management software, fantastic innovative solutions and clearly the market leader. All the functionality comes at a great cost however and most people/organisations will never actually use the whiz bang features that they want to pay for. Storage vmotion is very cool though.
Citrix/Oracle
Both look good and have an attractive pricing option. The lack of memory overallocation in the Xen based offerings is an issue for me but we may end up using Oracle to virtualise some of our Oracle based systems just so oracle can support the whole stack.
Microsoft
Eerily similar in design to Xen I find. Similar issues with no memory overallocation. Cost implications for the hypervisor if you want to run more than a few VM's on a host and the lack of support for various Linux disto's is worrying. I'm also a little concerned about stability and reliability. I got an email from a reseller saying "The new release is more stable than the previous version." which doesn't fill me with confidence.
Proxmox
Love the elegant and powerful simplicity of this product. No frills, just exactly what you need to deliver a virtual environment. I'll be looking at using the new kernel with KSM as I think this will help VM density. Would like to see the user access control bit scheduled for 2.0 as this may be a stumbling block for me.
RedHat
New kid on the block but hopes are high. I've not found out too much about their offering yet but with their acquisition of KVM they will no doubt drag the KVM name into the limelight.
Thanks
Chris
I'm about to embark on some research and testing of different server virtualisation products (i.e. VMWare, Citrix, Oracle, Proxmox, RedHat, Hyper-V) and I wanted to ask the wonderful proxmox community if they had any advice on some good products for benchmarking performance that works on a Windows environment.
I want to check disk and network performance along with pure CPU grunt.
Also, if anyone out there has done a similar exercise before, I'd love to hear your conclusions.
If anyone is interested in my thoughts on the various products from the paper research I've done so far, read on and please contradict me if you disagree...
VMWare
Good performance, great management software, fantastic innovative solutions and clearly the market leader. All the functionality comes at a great cost however and most people/organisations will never actually use the whiz bang features that they want to pay for. Storage vmotion is very cool though.
Citrix/Oracle
Both look good and have an attractive pricing option. The lack of memory overallocation in the Xen based offerings is an issue for me but we may end up using Oracle to virtualise some of our Oracle based systems just so oracle can support the whole stack.
Microsoft
Eerily similar in design to Xen I find. Similar issues with no memory overallocation. Cost implications for the hypervisor if you want to run more than a few VM's on a host and the lack of support for various Linux disto's is worrying. I'm also a little concerned about stability and reliability. I got an email from a reseller saying "The new release is more stable than the previous version." which doesn't fill me with confidence.
Proxmox
Love the elegant and powerful simplicity of this product. No frills, just exactly what you need to deliver a virtual environment. I'll be looking at using the new kernel with KSM as I think this will help VM density. Would like to see the user access control bit scheduled for 2.0 as this may be a stumbling block for me.
RedHat
New kid on the block but hopes are high. I've not found out too much about their offering yet but with their acquisition of KVM they will no doubt drag the KVM name into the limelight.
Thanks
Chris
