Benchmarking saga continues

Benchmarking of virtualization technologies has apparently become a popular news subject.

XenSource has just published a paper that compares VMware ESX 3 and XenSource  Enterprise 3.2 – as already reported by VMblog.com and virtualization.info. Individual results have been already available, but VMware kindly allowed XenSource to publish the results in a single paper, side-by-side. The result is that in terms of performance, XenSource is as good or slightly better than ESX. Also, the more virtual CPUs are added, the more confident XenSource leads.

As you might remember, VMware originally compared commercial Windows-optimized version of their product with version of Xen, which was not intended for commercial use and not optimized for Windows.

Now, couple of days ago, InfoWorld compared four desktop virtualization products and found that in most tests Parallels 2.2 is faster than beta of VMware Workstation 6.0. Here VMware says that it’s not correct to put a commercial optimized version of Parallels Desktop against VMware Workstation Beta 6.0, which is of course not intended for commercial use and not optimized.

Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi

If you are wondering how this is all related to Virtuozzo, look at what Kir wrote in his OpenVZ blog – http://community.livejournal.com/openvz/14024.html. You can see the results for yourself here (German original) and here ( fragment translated to English). As you might now, OpenVZ is the foundation of Virtuozzo for Linux distributed as open source product. To summarize:

·         OpenVZ is on par with Xen for CPU-intensive tasks

·         OpenVZ is a bit better than Xen in networking

·         OpenVZ is somewhat or much better than Xen in I/O and IPC

And finally – thanks VMblog.com for the news – here is the comparison of the several popular server virtualization technologies – VMware, Xen, UML and Vserver. Look for yourself – it’s a pretty interesting read. I will try to contact these guys and ask them to add Virtuozzo in the mix, and then I’ll get back with more detailed analysis.

The Virtuozzo Blog is moving

Hi everyone,
Virtuozzo Blog is moving to http://virtuozzoblog.swsoft.com – please, update your references.

Thanks a lot,

Ilya Baimetov

VMware attacks Microsoft

The MSFT licensing “whitepaper” by VMware generated a lot of buzz. Some even went as far as comparing it to Netscape and suggesting that we all should expect a lawsuit by VMware – oh, please. Few comments in this regard:

·         Before blaming MSFT, VMware needs to take an effort to be more forthcoming with their APIs and formats. Unlike MSFT’s VHD spec, VMDK SDK and specs cannot be freely downloaded and VMware VMI specification is not implemented in any VMware product.

·         Microsoft has been, slowly but surely, changing their licensing for server products towards making it less restrictive – Windows Data Center allows unlimited number of virtual environments, as well as SQL Server Enterprise allows unlimited number of SQL Server instances on one box regardless of what server virtualization product is used.

·         I am, myself, not very excited about a perspective of paying $300 for Vista Business if I want to run Vista on my Mac (inside Parallels), but Vista is not being very widely deployed yet, so it’s not really an imminent problem. And as a Mac user I will stick with XP simply because all Windows software I need runs fine on XP.

Bottom line, for the moment all these problems are all but hypothetical. We should of course let MSFT know if we are unhappy with some of their policies, but it’s way too early to ring the bell. So, let’s tell them, not scream and yell at them – that way we have a much better chance of being heard.