Bare metal hypervisors: a group test

David Jones ZDNet Australia

Published: 01 Jun 2009

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Go to section: Introduction How we tested Accessibility Manageability Test results Summary

How we tested

Our objective was to perform a set of (repeatable) tasks on virtual machines running on top of the various hypervisors and measure the performance of these tasks.

The server we used for this testing was kindly provided by Xenon. Featuring dual quad-core Intel Xeon E5462 processors, 8GB of RAM and a 750GB hard drive, it runs on a Super Micro X7DWU motherboard with ATI ES1000 graphics and an Adaptec 3405 RAID controller.

Xenon's physical server was first tested with a native install of Windows Server 2003 SP1 to establish a performance baseline using the eight CPU cores and 8GB of RAM available. The hypervisors were configured with four virtual CPUs and 3.5GB of RAM (leaving 1GB free for the hypervisor). This is the maximum configuration possible for all the servers, except for XenServer, which supports up to eight virtual CPUs. A fresh install of Windows Server 2003 SP1 was then installed on the configured virtual machine (VM) on each of the hypervisors in turn, and the following tests were run:

• The OS was upgraded from SP1 to SP2, the time taken was recorded
• Sungard was run and the result recorded
• Cinebench single CPU was run and the result recorded
• Cinebench xCPU was run and the result recorded
• A 600MB file was copied up and down from a network share
• A 4GB file was copied up and down from the network share

VMware Server 2, a Type 2 virtualisation product, was then tested as another control to see how hypervisors performed.

Testing procedure
The testing procedure was divided up into the following categories:

• Product features and function — maximum configuration sizes
• Product accessibility — how easy it is to download and install
• Manageability — how easy it is to create and manage virtual machines

Product features and functions
The following table summarises each of the products' configuration limits:

Go to section: Introduction How we tested Accessibility Manageability Test results Summary

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