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HP labs compares OpenVZ and Xen

HP labs has performed and published a performance evaluation of OpenVZ and Xen for server consolidation. The 14 pages PDF can be viewed here: HPL-2007-59R1.pdf (418K). Update: links to the paper updated.

I wrote about a Xen/OpenVZ comparison last month here -- the one that was done by a German student as his thesis. I am really glad to see another third party evaluation. (I would never ever trust any comparisons done by or sponsored by vendors.) I also like the level of details provided. Here are quotes from the last section:

For all the configurations and workloads we have tested, Xen incurs higher virtualization overhead than OpenVZ does, resulting in larger difference in application performance when compared to the base Linux case.
<...>
For all the cases tested, the virtualization overhead observed in OpenVZ is limited, and can be neglected in many scenarios.

For all configurations, the Web tier CPU consumption for Xen is roughly twice that of the base system or OpenVZ.


Does that mean OpenVZ is better for scenarios such as Linux servers consolidation? Yes, much better. Does that mean Xen is not good? No, not really. Xen has its applications as well (say when you also want to run Windows on the same piece of hardware), and in fact OpenVZ and Xen can nicely and happily co-exist.

Comments

(Anonymous)
Apr. 26th, 2007 07:28 pm (UTC)
OpenVZ and Xen, both on the same kernel
I am using OpenVZ on centos 4.4 as host and centos, suse as guest. It works great.

You assert that:

"in fact OpenVZ and Xen can nicely and happily co-exist"

that's why I would like to ask you if this is true and if I can have the same kernel patched for Xen and also OpenVZ to play arround with them in the same time, only for testing, not for production server.

Can you provide a kernel which has both?

thank you,
Ionut
k001
May. 3rd, 2007 08:06 am (UTC)
Re: OpenVZ and Xen, both on the same kernel
Currently we do not have kernel which has both Xen and OpenVZ — but we try to implement that in our RHEL5-2.6.18 branch, with the help of our users. Latest kernel from this branch (2.6.18-8.el5 028stab031.1) already includes a few patches towards that (search for xen in this changelog if you are curious). Finally, we have an open bug report in our bugzilla (bug #557) to make Xen working — you can add yourself to Cc to this bug if you are interested in its progress.
anyher
May. 30th, 2007 06:17 pm (UTC)
Re: OpenVZ and Xen, both on the same kernel
Wow. Looks almost fantastic.

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