Performance/Response Time
Response Time
Benchmark Description
The aim of this benchmark is to measure how fast can application inside of virtual machine (VM) or operating system container (CT) react on external request under various conditions:
- Idle system and idle VM/CT
- Busy system and idle VM/CT
- Busy system and busy VM/CT
Described benchmark case is common for many latency sensitive real life workloads. For example: high performance computing, image processing and rendering, web and database servers and so on.
Implementation
To measure response time we use well known netperf TCP_RR test. To emulate busy VM/CT we run CPU eater program (busyloop) inside of it. To emulate busy system we run several busy VM/CT (to eat all the host CPU time). Netperf runs in server mode inside of one VM/CT. On the separate physical host we run netperf TCP_RR test against selected VM/CT over the 1Gbit network.
Testbed Configuration
Server: 4xHexCore Intel Xeon (2.66 GHz), 32 GB RAM
Client: 4xHexCore Intel Xeon (2.136 GHz), 32 GB RAM
Network: 1Gbit direct server<>client connection
Virtualization Software: ESXi4.1upd1, XenServer5.6fp1, HyperV (R2), OpenVZ (RHEL6) 2.6.32-042test006.1.x86_64
Guest OS: CentOS 5.5 x86_64
Software and Tunings:
- netperf v2.4.5
- one VM/CT with netperf in server mode configured with 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM
- six VMs/CTs (to load server CPU - see testcases) configured with 4 vCPU, 1GB RAM
- netperf command
- in VM/CT:
netserver -p 30300 - on the client:
netperf -p 30300 -H 172.0.1.1 -t TCP_RR -l 120 -- -r 128 -s 128
- in VM/CT:
- Firewall was turned off
- All other tunables were left at default values.
Benchmark Results
In all the three cases (idle system and idle VM/CT, busy system and idle VM/CT, busy system and busy VM/CT) OpenVZ show the lowest overhead over all the tested virtualization solutions
