|
 Watch VMware & Dell Virtualization Video
Cloud Computing Video
Welcome to NTAI's Virtual Concepts Program,
In this cousre you will explore the benefits and drawbacks of the three major virtual server products, Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix's Zen Server and Vmware's ESXi Server. You will install and configure them to get a hands-on understanding of the products.
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V builds on the architecture and functions of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V by adding multiple new features that enhance product flexibility. The adoption of virtualization in the enterprise has increased flexibility in deployment and life cycle management of applications. IT professionals deploy and use virtualization to consolidate workloads and reduce server sprawl. Additionally, they deploy virtualization with clustering technologies to provide a robust IT infrastructure with high availability and quick disaster recovery. Even so, customers are looking for more flexibility.
Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V provides greater flexibility with live migration. Live migration is integrated with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. With Hyper-V live migration, you can move running virtual machines (VMs) from one Hyper-V physical host to another, without any disruption or perceived loss of service. IT professionals increasingly look to live migration to create a dynamic and flexible IT environment that responds to emerging business needs. Live migration provides the core technology required for dynamic load balancing, VM placement, high availability for virtualized workloads during physical computer maintenance, and reduced data center power consumption.
Transform your Business with Virtualization
Virtualization dramatically improves the efficiency and availability of resources and applications in your organization. Internal resources are underutilized under the old “one server, one application” model and IT admins spend too much time managing servers rather than innovating. An automated datacenter, built on a VMware virtualization platform, lets you respond to market dynamics faster and more efficiently than ever before. VMware vSphere delivers resources, applications—even servers—when and where they’re needed. VMware customers typically save 50-70% on overall IT costs by consolidating their resource pools and delivering highly available machines with VMware vSphere.
- Run multiple operating systems on a single computer including Windows, Linux and more.
- Let your Mac run Windows creating a virtual PC environment for all your Windows applications.
- Reduce capital costs by increasing energy efficiency and requiring less hardware and increasing your server to admin ratio
- Ensure your enterprise applications perform with the highest availability and performance
- Build up business continuity through improved disaster recovery solutions and deliver high availability throughout the datacenter
- Improve enterprise desktop management & control with faster deployment of desktops and fewer support calls due to application conflicts
XenServer has fast become a leading server virtualization technology with over 5,000 customers and enterprise-class features that rival leading virtualization platforms. XenServer, as recently reviewed by Allan Stevens of ZDnet, “is very much a production-class virtualization solution with features that match, and in some cases exceed, what’s available on rival platforms.”
- Best virtualization value – Starting with the virtualization power of the industry-leading Xen®hypervisor at no cost, users can extend their server consolidation savings into capital equipment, space, power and cooling costs.
- Enterprise-class features – Centralized multi-server management and live migration using XenMotion enables users to manage the virtualized environment easily and intelligently while optimizing resource with zero-downtime to users.
- Easy setup and administration – Being easy to use is just one reason XenServer was named the Most Innovative Product of the Year for virtualization in 2008 by VARBusiness. XenServer can be installed and running in about 10 minutes (10 to Xen) and also has a unique management architecture that eliminates single points of failure. Easily manage hundreds of virtual machines with the included XenCenter management console that installs with only 4 megabytes of storage.
It doesn’t matter how hard you look, it’s almost impossible that you are going to find a performance comparison that involves Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX.
The VMware End User License Agreement (EULA) specifically says that the company won’t recognize any 3rd party performance testing before it has the chance to review and approve the adopted methodology.
(before June 2006 the situation was even worse as VMware simply didn’t allow the publishing of any benchmark comparison)
At these conditions, the chances that you’ll see an independent benchmark where VMware is outperformed by its competitors are zero.
Despite that, last week a group of brave reporters at Virtualization Review challenged VMware and published an independent analysis without asking any permission.
To ensure the validity of our test results and testing environment, Virtualization Review enlisted the help of Stuart Yarost to formulate and validate the test plan. Yarost is an ASQ Certified Software Quality Engineer and Certified Quality Engineer with more than 22 years' experience in the software and quality fields. Yarost currently holds the position of Vice Chair of Programs for the ASQ Software Division.
The results are more than interesting:
- In our tests, Hyper-V did well in all categories-it's a real, viable competitor for the competition.
- XenServer's test results are impressive, but are they enough to justify a replacement of your current hypervisor? For environments with virtualized systems that have a large number of CPU- and memory-intensive workloads, it may be a good choice. The caution is that those high I/O workloads flirt with not being good virtualization candidates, so some administrators might instinctively place these workloads on physical systems. Make no mistake, however: XenServer did extremely well, posting excellent performance numbers.
- For the first two tests of heavy workloads, VMware underperformed both XenServer and Hyper-V. For the lighter workloads on the third test, the results were almost indistinguishable across the platforms, but ESX had the best results in three of the four categories.
Easy to guess, VMware is not happy and yesteday severely criticized Virtualization Review on the corporate blog Virtual Reality with the post: A big step backwards for virtualization benchmarking.
The list of objections is long:
-
- The fact that ESX is completing so many more CPU, memory, and disk operations than Hyper-V obviously means that cycles were being used on those components as opposed to SQL Server. Which is the right place for the hypervisor to schedule resources? It’s not possible to tell from the scarce details in the results.
- All resource-intensive SQL Servers in virtual and native environments have large pages enabled. ESX supports this behavior but no other hypervisor does. This test didn’t use that key application and OS feature.
- The effects of data placement with respect to partition alignment were not planned for. VMware has documented the impact of this oversight to be very significant in some cases.
- The disk tests are based on Passmark’s load generation, which uses a test file in the guest operating system. But the placement of that file, and its alignment with respect to the disk system, was not controlled in this test.
- The SQL Server workload was custom built and has not been investigated, characterized, or understood by anyone in the industry. As a result, its sensitivity to memory, CPU, network and storage changes is totally unknown, and not documented by the author. There are plenty of industry standard benchmarks to use with hypervisors and the days of ad hoc benchmark tests have passed. Virtual machines are fully capable of running the common benchmarks that users know and understand like TPC, SPECweb and SPECjbb. An even better test isVMmark, a well-rounded test of hypervisor performance that has been adopted by all major server vendors as the standard measurement of virtualization platforms or the relatedSPECvirt benchmark under development by SPEC.
- With ESX’s highest recorded storage throughput already measured at over 100,000 IOPS on hundreds of disks, this experiment’s use of an undocumented, but presumably very small, number of spindles would obviously result in a storage system bottleneck. Yet storage performance results vary by tremendous amounts. Clearly there's an inconsistency in the configuration.
|
