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."

Comments

Re:Oblig. Nonsensical reference

[fred911]

Are you sure you didn't mean..

"'Twas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabe:All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe".

Sorry... it was the 1st thing I thought of when I read the article

Yes, but does it run Linux\\\\\Windows ?

[billstewart]

I assume that most of these different approaches to virtualization will run some versions of the Linux kernel as a client, perhaps even most versions, and that you can talk BSDs into running on them as well (though it'd be particularly nice to know whether OpenBSD runs on them), and that you can run most of them on top of most Linuxes and maybe most BSDs (again, OpenBSD's the interesting one, due to security).

But which ones of these things can run Windows clients, at least XP? VMWare can, User Mode Linux can't, but what about OpenVZ, Xen, and some of the others? There are times that it's convenient to have a Windows client OS, so I can run TurboTax and other Windows applications, but mostly I'd like a real OS underneath.

Also, do any of these make USB devices visible to the client OS? Or do they all just have to network-mount resources that are actually mounted in the host OS?