Performance of Redhat 5 server on ESX 3.0.2

[shope928]

I have a linux admin that is running unixbench on a vmware and xen server. Both are on identical hardware and both are configured with 3 Gb Memory and running the disk images off the local disk. The Xen server is running much faster in the tests. What can I do to get the vmware server to get closer to the xen box in the test results. Final results on VMWare = 160 where the xen results are 304. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[RParker]

Wow, that is surprising. Everything else I read shows VM Ware ESX is pretty competitive..

Interesting performance. I know you said identical hardware, but I question almost double performance.. something doesn't seem right there....

[shope928]

Both are Dell 1950 servers with 8 GB Physical RAM 2 quad core 2.0 Ghz Procs with mirrored 146 Gb 15K drives. Perc 5/i controller 1 Gb Ethernet Connection.

[gorto]

If the RH guest is "enlightened" then I'm not surprised. Pound for pound an enlightened guest will run faster.

[deploylinux]

XEN uses a virtualization architecture that gives significant performance gains if you use the same OS in the guests as the host. And, RedHat has essentially designed their RHEL5 release to incorporate XEN and run RHEL5 guests at top performance.

That's great if all you care about is performance and will be running only RHEL5. VMware ESX is designed to allow you to run any OS on top of it with good performance and with enterprise scaleability/reliability/security/management tools. IMHO, Xen is still a few years behind in those areas. Eventually they might and probably will catch up, but I don't think it will be anytime soon.

[gorto]

Again, to quote William Gibson "The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet."