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Performance Evaluation of Xen Vs. OpenVZ

An anonymous reader writes "Compared to an operating-system-level virtualization technology like OpenVZ, Xen — a hypervisor-level virtualization technology that allows multiple operating systems to be run with and without para-virtualization — trades off performance for much better isolation and security. OpenVZ's performance advantage due to running virtual containers in a single operating system kernel can be significant. A performance evaluation study (PDF) done by researchers at the University of Michigan and HP labs provides insight into how big a performance penalty Zen pays and what causes the overheads (primarily L2 cache misses)." From the report: "We compare both technologies with a base system in terms of application performance, resource consumption, scalability, low-level system metrics like cache misses and virtualization-specific metrics like Domain-0 consumption in Xen. Our experiments indicate that the average response time can increase by over 400% in Xen and only a modest 100% in OpenVZ as the number of application instances grows from one to four... A similar trend is observed in CPU consumptions of virtual containers."

4 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Looks like analyst talk by fred911 · · Score: 2, Funny

    " hypervisor-level virtualization technology that allows multiple operating systems to be run with and without para-virtualization "

      I don't know about you but it still makes my eyes hurt!

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  2. Oblig. Nonsensical reference by jd · · Score: 5, Funny
    how big a performance penalty Zen pays

    Zen's performance issues were fixed by Avon, under Orac's guidance.

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    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  3. Yes, but ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Does it run multiple instances of Linux?

    1. Re:Yes, but ... by TommydCat · · Score: 3, Funny

      Perhaps you can harness all of those multiple instances in a beowolf cluster.... Hmmmm!

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      This comment does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the author.