Network Performance
Netperf is used for testing network performance. The chart below shows the results forTCP stream performance.
What is apparent here is that the performance differences in the 100Mbps setup are negligible. From googling around, it seems to be more challenging to achieve similar results with 1Gbps and 10Gbps networks so the results can be different there, but I don’t have the network to test this.
Up next is a request/response test measuring how many requests/responses can be handled per second.
Again the results show that on my 100Mbps network there is practically no difference between the virtio network driver and an emulated RTL8139 driver.
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Great post indeed, Thank you very much.
It’s been days since I’ve been reading through lots of pages, including IBM’s library, on this subject and I must say this is a nice, well written and comprehensive article that summarize them all!
Thanks again.
Thanks for you comments. I started to look at KVM because I had a lot of issues with opensource XEN, including compatibility with display drivers, and stability problems.
I have been using KVM now since December 2010 and I must say I am really satisfied. No issues whatsoever with this technology. At the moment I am running 4 virtual machines, where 3 of them are always running and I haven’t experienced any significant issues at all.
One thing I learned recently is that with an LVM based setup, with VMs running straight from a logical volume, you should use native IO and disable caching. Especially the native IO can reduce workload on your host system. Although the workload is a bit artificial sometimes it is nice to have a workload value on the host which is never much higher than that on the guests combined. These settings are also the default on RHEL 6.2 and Centos 6.2.
It is also interesting to know that recent linux kernels (and also the custom ones shipped with Centos/RHEL 6.2) have a feature called ‘transparent hugepages’ which eliminates the need to configure anything special for hugepages.
Yeah, I noticed that transparent haugepages on Ubuntu Server 12.04.
Thanks for the heads up too, appreciate it.