What's a good way to compare the performance of an old physical and new virtual machine?

[Shuji]

What's a good way to compare the performance of an old physical and new virtual machine? I was thinking to use Super PI and Sandra Lite benchmarking tools on both physical and virtual machines and test CPU, memory, HDD and network. Is this alright? Thanks.

Shuji

[PduPreez]

Hi

Using traditional performance monitoring utilities on VMs is not recommended. The stats you get are inaccurate and thus unhelpful.

See KB: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-3930

So you would need a performance monitoring tool for the Physical and a different monitoring tool for the VM like "Veeam Monitoring"

Also see thread: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/110730

Regards

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[Shuji]

Hi PduPreez, thanks for replying to my question. I may have made a mistake when I asked the question. What I want to do is to benchmark the old physical server and get the results. Then benchmark the virtualized server, get the results and compare it with the physical server. Esxtop is for monitoring the performance of the VM like the performance tab in Windows task manager. I want to measure the CPU speed, HDD read and write rate, network speed, etc and compare the results. Is there a way to do it? Thanks.

Shuji

[AlexBakman]

The only real way to compare performance is of course with end user feedback. Simply ask users is it as fast as it was? see what they say

If you want to get into the server side performance side, you need to measure CPU, Memory, storage and storage I/O. For each are there are about 20 key performance metrics to consider for comparioson. See the white paper on this topic at www.vkernel.com

[Shuji]

Alex,

If that is the real way to compare performance then it is much easier to do. 😃 Thanks also for the link.

Shuji