VM /ETC

PCQuest has published a performance comparison of popular virtualization platforms from Microsoft, Citrix, and VMware. In the report titled Virtualization Platforms Compared, the testing measures various CPU and graphics card benchmarks of the VMs running on the different platforms. Check the report out for yourself, but the testing details explained in the report left me confused. Since there is no option for comments at PCQuest I am posting about it here at VM /ETC.

Here’s the test setup info from the report:

“Here, we test the top three different virtualization platforms: VMware Infrastructure 3.5, MS Hyper-V and Citrix Xen Server 5 to help you make an informed decision.

Test setup
For testing we used the latest Intel Dunnington Server having 4 processors with 6 cores each and 16 GB RAM. For benchmarking we used CINEBENCH 10 64-bit, POV Ray 64-bit and Linpack. We ran these benchmarks on Windows 2003 Enterprise 64-bit OS which was installed virtually on different platforms. We tried to form a common ground for comparing these platforms based on the number of processor cores in each platform.

We found out that MS Hyper-V and VMware Server allow only upto 4 cores per processor whereas Xen Server allows allocation of 8 cores per virtual machine. So, we took 4 cores as the standard across all platforms. But we also tested for 8 cores with the Xen Server, so that we get to know the difference in performance.”

My understanding of the benchmark results are that VMware actually performed the tests the fastest, but the graphics rendering and fps results were actually better in VMs on Hyper-V and XenServer. In my opinion, the biggest take away was that 8 vCPU VMs on XenServer outperformed all others which, although not too surprising, unfortunately only serves as a big distraction from the standard methodology needed to be maintained for a fair comparison.

It is also disappointing to me that PCQuest refers to “VMware Server” throughout most of the report instead of ESX/ESXi 3.5. Although the report starts off by saying the comparison was made with VMware Infrastructure 3.5, the repeated references to the free, hosted virtualization product from VMware makes me question what hypervisor was really used during these tests. VMware Server 2.0 also supports 64 bit guests and uses a (web) client to configure VMs, so reviewing the build process really does not provide a clear answer to which platform was tested.

Since PCQuest does not allow for a discussion on their site feel free to comment here about your take on this report.

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